If you haven’t heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, you might not spend enough time online. But recent exposure of Marvel’s support for the bill has outraged fans across the internet on major comics news sites, blogs and forums and Twitter, calling for retaliation against The House of Ideas.
I understand why Marvel would support the bill. First, and most importantly, being an owned subsidiary of The House of Mouse (Disney/ABC/ESPN, etc) they now have to toe the corporate line. Second, comics are incredibly pirated products. Just doing a search on major bit torrent sites and you can. . . .well, pretty much download most every major Marvel comic from the last 70 years and fit it on a large external hard drive. That’s pretty terrible if you think about it. And, let’s be fair- DC is pro-SOPA as well, at least inasmuch as they are a part of the larger Time Warner family of corporations.
Let me state again, for the record, that we at BSR are ANTI-piracy. We are pro-comics, and piracy is a major problem with the industry today, just as with all entertainment media. We respect the rights of creators who put their genius into delivering greatness into our hands every week, every month, and respect their rights to get paid. We even point you to some of our favorites in the realm of digital comics– one of which, I would like to point out, is about Marvel digital comics on sale. We love comics, we are anti-piracy and pro-digital distribution. Absolutely.
But, just as categorically I can state that SOPA will not help one bit. The bill will allow any person to make a claim against a website (say BigShinyRobot. . . or Google. . . or YouTube. . .or Flikr) that it is hosting copyrighted materials, and without an investigation, without a warrant, without any probable cause– just a complaint– the host ISP has to shut the ENTIRE SITE down. Take, for example, the image I’ve used to in this post. This is one of my favorite comic book covers from books I collected when I was younger. I’ve added the “This is what Wolverine does to Pirates” which makes my use of this image fall under “fair use.” But if someone were to complain, they could– and shut down the entire site without any adjudication by any legal authority. Not only does SOPA violate basic principles of due process, it uses a nuclear bomb to strike at a gnat.
Read more at Big Shiny Robotz
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