The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and it’s sister bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), are both making headway in their respective houses of Congress right now and are hard to miss if you spend much time at all watching the news or trolling your favorite social network. I’m not necessarily here to persuade you one direction or another regarding in how you should view the bills but I would encourage you to take a few minutes to learn a bit more about the bill and how it might affect you going forward.
The bill(s) essentially are going up for discussion and voting once the houses reconvene in a week or two and if you want to have any say in how they are voted upon, you might want to take a moment to call/email your representatives.
Highlight arguments for the bill include the ambitious goal of stopping piracy and copyright infringement on the Internet; a noble goal indeed. The proponents of the bill say that content creators will ultimately make more money since you would have to go directly to the source to buy/obtain whatever material you’re trying to consume.
Opponents against the bill are quick to point out that it’s pretty vague language that fails to drive home the point that they’re willing to shut down sites (along with judicial-related punishment for site owners) like YouTube, Google, Twitter, Facebook and millions of others in attempt to eradicate the small minority of offenders.
Groups like the MPAA, RIAA [read: big money lawyers backed by the movie and music industries], NBC, Ford, NBA and associations like the National Chamber of Commerce are all backers of the bill, and as you can probably guess, have a significant amount of money on their side to push this type of legislature through.
There’s plenty of research out there for you to take some time to form your own opinions off of, as an Internet user, I’d encourage you to at least get informed on your own. If nothing else, take ten minutes to run through this Wiki of SOPA/PIPA and educate yourself a little on this Friday. It may not end up affecting you one way or another but I’d hate for you to be uninformed about such a significant legislature that might just alter the way you consume content on the Internet for the foreseeable future.
After learning the facts, you might just want to do something about it. If you’re an American, lucky you, you have the right to do so.
Sean and Lisa Ohlenkamp set out to see what happens in bookstores at night; with a crew of over 20 people, they spent several nights animating and documenting the happenings at TYPE Books in Toronto, CA. Good stuff.
I’m a little late in getting this to you but you’ve still got a couple of weeks to hopefully enjoy it before you’re completely tired of Christmas music. If you’re new to these parts, feel free to digbackthrough the archives and find any/all of the previous tracks I’ve posted. Hopefully the links are still working; if not, feel free to ping me and I can do my best to help you out.
I should probably do some explaining for things like Beiber and Train but I’ll just ask you to hold your judgement until you’ve had a chance to check them out once or twice.
In lieu of giving you 20-30 products that I think are cool, this year I chose to go a different route and reach out to a few that I connect regularly with to have them help curate a list of potential gifts for us, you, or the ones you might be buying for.
I gave them no constraints on what to pick but I did make sure to get a couple of ladies in the mix just to get that perspective. Some of the things on the list you could pick up today and some of them you’ll probably have to wait a little longer before acquiring due to budgetary constraints. I had a good time compiling; I think the participants had a good time collecting; and I hope that you’ll have a good time reading through the list.
See anything we missed? Let me know here or on Twitter. Spread the word.
2011 Collab-mas List – A collaborated Christmas list by Christian Ross & Friends
*If you’re an IE user, it’s not that I don’t dislike you, but you’re gonna have to be happy with what you get. It ain’t pretty but I’ve got other things to get done today.
Due to my adventures in Central America this week there has been a bit of a radio silence on the Internets save for one area. I’ve tried to do much better about documenting my trip this time in visual form and the easiest way for me to do so has been to share photos through a combination of Instagram and Tumblr.
If you haven’t already, I (and we all on this trip) would be highly encouraged by you visiting and following along on Instagram at the username: christianross or for those without iPhones, following along on my Tumblr blog at christianross.tumblr.com.
One feeds the other so you don’t have to do both but we have been uplifted by the notes, reblogs and mentions from people all over the world.
