But what actually happened and why?

Throughout Wednesday, January 18th, there was a coordinated effort on the Internet to display, in an exceptionally visual manner, what the Internet could look like if bills such as SOPA and PIPA were to be passed in Congress. At the heart of the Internet strike was freedom of the Internet. One of the most notable effects of the strike was the complete blackout staged by Wikipedia. Other sites, such as Google, simply placed a blackout bar across their name and allowed users to continue to make use of the site’s services.

So why the huge protest? SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are trying to do good things, the problem is that they are trying to do good by doing a lot of possible harm.

SOPA is more formally known as “H.R.3261 — Stop Online Piracy Act”. You can find it on THOMAS, or check H.R. 3261 – Stop Online Privacy Act which is where I located it as of the time I am writing this, or the THOMAS entry for SOPA at the thomas.loc.gov website.

The first thing you see under the heading of the bill is the mission statement of the bill:

“To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by
combating  the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.”

The first thing I have to think is – what other purposes?

The Stop Online Piracy Act, hereafter referred to as SOPA, was introduced in the House of Representatives on October 26, 2011 by Mr. Smith of Texas for himself, Mr. Conyers, Mr. Goodlatte, Mr. Berman, Mr. Griffin of Arkansas, Mr. Gallegly, Mr. Deutch, Mr. Chabot, Mr. Ross of Florida, Mrs. Blackburn, Mrs. Bono Mack, Mr. Terry and Mr. Schiff.

What concerns manyof those who oppose the bill is the manner in which SOPA seeks to stop online piracy. It is a long bill, so I will pinpoint areas I have seen that others have discussed, however, I encourage you to please read the bill for yourself.

I will be referring to the H.R. 3261 – Stop Online Privacy Act link in the following points:

Page 10.1 —-

Sec. 102 Action by Attorney General to protect U.S. customers
and prevent U.S. support of foreign infringing sites.

Sounds okay, right? I mean, we want our government to protect us, right? And they do have a few pages there that discuss how they find the owner of sites and order them to stop doing what they do not like. Then we get down to page 13, lines 21-25, and page 14, lines 1-10:

(i) IN GENERAL. — A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) that is subject to the order, including measures designed to prevent the domain name of the foreign infringing site (or portion thereof) from resolving to that domain name’s Internet Protocol address. Such actions shall be taken as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.

Move on down to page 15, lines 11-20, and we have…

B) INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES.—A provider of an Internet search engine shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, but in any case within 5 days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order, designed to prevent the foreign infringing site that is subject to the order, or a portion of such site specified in the order, from being served as a direct hypertext link.

Now it is possible that your favorite picture site will be compliant and remove all images that infringe on any copyrights, but if they don’t then the entire site is likely to be blocked by search engines so you can’t find them via a search engine anymore. And, even if you do have them bookmarked or the URL memorized so do not see why them no longer showing up on a search engine is a bad thing, page 15 line 21 kicks off another reason why you should be worried about SOPA.

That is where they specify that if you pay to use the legal parts of a website that has illegal content on it, that your payment network can still block you from making subscription payments to that service.  Ending your ability to subscribe to it from within the United States.

What is of concern to manyis that by providing any sort of service where persons can communicate (think about your favorite forum or social networking site), or post content for others to download (think about your favorite file or document or image sharing site), the site owner can be held liable if their site is used for illegal purposes. Not the entire site, if just a portion of it is used for illegal purposes.

It is good to have someone make sure that your site is are not being abused or used for pirating, but as SOPA stands now, I would have to completely close my sites to comments (including my forums) so I could read EVERY comment before it was posted or I would face a $2,000,000 fine and prison time. For multiple cases a $5,000,000 fine. (And note that the same bill has $5,000,000 as the fine levied for someone that intentionally causes harm or death to someone or who shares military or government secrets – WHY is murder and treason comparable in fine to sharing two songs online????? Shouldn’t murder and treason be a bit more serious than an artist losing the sale of a .99 cent song???)

If I just leave my sites (as I have been known to do – a LOT), and someone posts links to where a movie can be downloaded (which BOTs do, a LOT), then under the SOPA bill I am held liable and fined multiple millions of dollars, plus whatever the entertainment industry decides to fine me for their lost income.

I’m in the US, and as far as I know all of my sites are too, but if a site is not in the US, and the site owner is not in the US to be dealt with personally by the laws of the US, then the Attorney General can order search engines to block your ability to see the site. (Section 102(c)(2)(B) as indicated in excerpt above – (Page 15, Lines 11-20)) That means the Attorney General decides to black out sections of the online world to US citizens. For their own good of course.

The scary part is, we, the people of the United States, would be giving our government the right to decided what sites need blocked from us. How easily could that power be abused?

And that is just part of what makes SOPA scary. I can’t go into full details in this post, so for a very good look at just what SOPA would mean, check out Why SOPA Is Dangerous byChris Held over at Mashable. He breaks it down into easily understandable language, but you still owe it to yourself to read the full bill and see just what it has to say for itself.

This post is VERY long, so I am going to break this discussion into a series of posts. Tomorrow I will tackle the next part of it: the Internet Strike and what happened with websites all across the Internet going dark for a day. I think if you read SOPA between now and then, you will understand why the sites felt it was necessary before I can get that post made, but come back anyway, I have some pictures of some of my favorites that I will share in tomorrow’s post. Then tomorrow or Monday I will get to why the Justice Department took down Megaupload and what you should know about Anonymous’ strike back, and why everything might have just been poorly timed events that snowballed to create the chaos it did.

I considered setting it up to be my desktop, but I decided that I prefer to just set it as the home page on my browser so that whenever I open my browser it is the first thing I see. That way I can leave the desktop area on my work computer for stuff sort of like those inspirational posters you see around regular offices.

How do you organize your work to-do lists?

So what happens when a drug that has slipped through the intense scrutiny that medications are supposed to go through before they are deemed safe for the consumer? In some cases there can be lawsuits when a drug has been linked to serious side effects. The attorneys of O’Hanlon, McCollom & Demerath handle issues such as those that would be faced in a Crestor lawsuit and know that such injuries may not be the fault of the consumer when it comes to prescribed drugs.

O’Hanlon, McCollom & Demerath is based in Austin Texas, see website linked above for full information.

First, the importance of knowing how to spell if you are going to be writing. Or at least using a spell checker, since most of the blatant errors I have been wading through were seriously blatant spelling errors.

Second, that someone can sue a third party for “loss of marital consortium”. …… yeah, I was stopped short when I read that. I had to go look it up, because surely it can’t mean what it looks like, right? Well… LexisNexis, the Iowa Law Review, defines it thus:

…. Loss of consortium is an action that has existed in various forms for centuries. ¹ At early common law, only a husband was able to bring a consortium action for the loss of his wife’s marital services. …..

…. The modern action for loss of consortium permits either spouse to sue for loss of the other’s love, society, affection, or sexual relations ….

So, uhh, yeah. It really does mean that a man can sue someone who he feels has caused his wife to stop performing her ‘wifely duties’.

Third, I just wasted a lot of sleep time that I will never get back, and the end result is being left wanting to speak up about someone that has in a roundabout manner dragged me into something I have no time or actual desire to be involved in. But tell me, how exactly does someone easily ignore having it implied that they are unethical?  How does someone ignore it when a person brings up their deceased mother and insinuates that she was a bad mother in how she raised her children, in how I was taught? How does one ignore insinuations by someone that never knew them or their parents that they were neglected as a child?

I don’t know. I have been trying to think for a while now if I should respond to the insinuations that were made about me, but I think I will try to leave that to others to respond to for at least a few more days. I will raise one question, however, since it is still puzzling me.

The person who made a not-so-round-about attack on my character and ethical position as an Internet Journalist, brought up something about Click Fraud. They outright accused someone else (not connected to my family) of having performed click fraud – which means boosting the number of clicks on something such as Google AdSense ads. Now the way they explained it was that someone had claimed to have clicked on someone else’s ads to make money… I have been an AdSense participant for many years, and I will tell you that in my understanding of the program, you can not go to someone else’s website and make money by clicking on the ads on that other person’s website. That person would make the money. So… how can the person in question that is insinuating click fraud seriously accuse someone else of making money by clicking on the accuser’s ads? I don’t understand that. And it is confusing enough that I apologize for the headache I likely just gave you trying to puzzle it through. I’ll go ask people in the Internet Advertisement Copywriting community.

I am going to go get an aspirin for the headache I have after the last seven hours of reading through posts that were attacks on myself via attacking my family, then get some much needed sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a long day, and I already lost far too much work time to trying to sort out what I had missed by not following what was being said about my family until last night. I’m still wanting to respond directly to the negative insinuations made about my ethical character, and the attacks that were levied against my mom. Instead, I will go get some sleep, and calm myself down, and yes, if you know my number, or instant messenger information, you can call and get all the details I am not posting here – just… wait until afternoon, please?

Oh, and, for the record. My name is Sandra Fikes. And yes, I do make money via my websites and blogs, and if I decide that the issue is worth my time I will be discussing it on a website that supports itself with advertising. I was quite content to ignore the situation, and would not even have bothered to read up about it for at least another month or two, had the person in question not made it a point to drag me into things, insinuated I am unethical, and made provably untrue and slanderous insinuations about my parents.

The question is raised because of the reaction of some fans to the addition of an outcry of “No!” in the scene in which Darth Vader throws Emperor Palpatine to his death in Return of the Jedi. Added for the Blue-Ray release of the original three Star Wars movies (Numbers 4, 5 and 6 for those who know the Star Wars numbering system), the outcry has caused an echo among the fans of the original movies, and raised a question. Does Lucas have the right to make that change? Or has he, for lack of a better way to phrase it, given the story to its fans in a finished form that can never be altered?

Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” And that it is true, for what artist is ever fully satisfied with something they have created. Who can not see ways in which to improve something they created, even after it has been called finished. Should someone be able to go back and add, or remove, something in the interest of making their creation more like what they envision for it to be? Does a man, like Lucas, have the right to make changes to their creation when a new version is going to be released?

Fans can be a treacherous slope to some creators. By now most of us are likely familiar with Stephen King’s horror novel Misery. A story in which an obsessed fan keeps her favorite author prisoner and forces him to write a new novel about her beloved character, just for her. Such extreme cases can only be hoped to be confined to the realm of fiction, but there is definitely a strong connection to someone else’s fictional creations when it comes to fans. This connection level varies along a very broad spectrum, one that could be an article on its own, and includes a sub-group of fans who, unlike the fanatical fan of King’s novel, write their own stories when the creator of a series has failed to write what they want.

The intricacies of copyright law and fan made works is a complexity that fills multiple volumes of books, and it narrows down to a simple focal point: Who controls the base creative product?

A significant number of artists, both writers and the creators of television shows and movies, set a precarious balance with their fans. Creators such as Gene Roddenberry and J.K. Rowling have been known to express their approval for fan made stories, while others, such as Anne McCaffery, creator of The Dragonriders of Pern series, were as equally well known to abolish any instance of fan made material as soon as it was discovered. McCaffery has recently changed her stance on fan made works, but it is still a precarious companionship for most creators. And not without good cause.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of the Darkover series, was extremely outspoken in her support of fan made stories set in the world she had created. Bradley even went so far as to voice disapproval with those, such as the Conan Doyle estate, who would seek to squash fan made fiction. In Fan Fiction and Copyright, Aaron Schwabach quotes Bradley as having said of fan made stories in her Darkover setting:

When I was a little kid, I was a great lover of “pretend” games, but after I was nine or ten, I could never get anyone to play them with me … And now I have a lot of fans, and friends, who will come into my magic garden and play the old “pretend games” with me.

Far, far away somewhere in the middle of the Galaxy, and about four thousand years from now, there is a world with a great red sun and four moons. Won’t you come and play with me there?

The idyllic shared play that Bradley loved was ended, and she withdrew all of her permissions and placed a ban on fan made works, following an incident in which Bradley was accused of plagiarism by a fan. The fan demanded equal collaborative and monetary credit for one of the stories that Bradley was writing, claiming the idea to have come from a story the fan had written set in Bradley’s Darkover world. It resulted in Bradley’s publisher refusing to publish the novel in an effort to avoid a lawsuit, and in authors everywhere taking a strong second look at fan made work.

Before the age of the Internet, Lucasfilm seemed to recognize the importance of fans to a work such as Star Wars when they created a licensing bureau for fan fiction:

At the height of the original Star Wars phenomenon, Lucasfilm was wary of giving its stamp of approval to the tremendous amount of fan fiction being published. Their solution, according to Gran, was to set up a no-fee licensing bureau that reviewed material and offered criticism about what might be considered copyright infringement.

After the 1990′s, the Lucasfilm stance shifted, but remained marginally accepting of some forms of fan works, according to a November 7, 1999 article at Space.com:

Fan fiction not welcome
While the news indicates that the Star Wars empire is taking a few cautious steps toward an “open source” model, Lucas is far from giving away all the keys to his kingdom.

The site is very stringent about only wanting “parodies and documentaries” — no “attempts to expand on the Star Wars universe will be accepted,” ensuring that George Lucas and the company he founded remain the only sources for canonical information and stories about Star Wars and its characters.

And that focuses us back to the key point here: Who has controlling power over a created work? Does the creator have the right to go back and modify a story before a second publication, or do they owe something to the fans and therefore must leave it forever as it was when it was initially released?

Can the creator never make modifications to craft their artwork into something more like what they envisioned it could be? Yes, there is a certain level of ‘It’s finished now, leave it alone,’ that is presumed. And in the case of a marble sculpture there is always the chance that one more chisel strike will break it, but is it not the right of the creator to adjust a bit here or there to make it more like what they want it to be – even at the risk of destroying their own creation.

Perhaps with all of the extras that the Blue-Ray format can accommodate there could be a copy of the original unmodified version of Star Wars included in the Blue-Ray edition, along with the Director’s Vision version. That way the fans who want to see the movie they saw in the theater can watch the original version, and those who want to see the movie George Lucas wanted to make can watch the Director’s Vision edition. Allowing them to see what Lucas now wishes he had thought to do before he released the movies the first time.

Whether or not Lucas includes an original edition with the Director’s Vision, the basic foundation of the matter remains the same. George Lucas, and anyone that has created a world and characters, should be able to adjust their creation if they feel it is necessary. The fans can complain, but in the end, it is up to the creator to make the final decision on whether they listen to what others say, or follow their hearts and create the story and world they wanted to the first time around.

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Critique This

Thank you for reading the entire article. I know it was a long one for the internet. I wrote it as practice for writing magazine length articles, so now that you have finished it I would welcome any critiques you might have on it. If you see something that was done wrong, or if there is something you particularly like about the article, please leave a critique comment on it. Your comments on this article will assist me in writing better articles in the future.

I am looking for the following:

1) Did you see a single underlying point within the article? What was it? Did I stay on point?
2) Was the article easy to read, or did you have to force yourself to finish it? Was the article too long? (1,349 words)
3) Did I answer all of the questions the article raised?

Anything else you might want to comment on would be appreciated, and I have a thick skin, so if you think I made a million grammatical errors and can’t write my way out of a paper bag, please let me know. I’m doing this to learn to improve my skills in article writing, so tear it apart.

Thank you!

If you check the Daz Studio 4 page for the basic Daz Studio 4 program it has a 100% markdown through October 31st. I just went through the full checkout process and sure enough, downloaded for free and it is now up and running on my computer.

So, why, you might ask, do I need Daz if I have Blender? Well, I got it because I was looking for how to use Poser files in Blender and someone had said that Daz can open Poser files and export them as files that Blender can read. So Daz is my bridge between the multitude of things that I can find to get for Poser but that are not available for Blender.

I’m still not certain what else Daz will be used for, but it looks promising for my plans to create character representations and mini movies for my websites.