From the great Nina Paley on Techdirt:

Clay Shirky: Why SOPA’s Not Going Away

from the it’s-about-eliminating-competition dept

I’m not big on videos over a minute long, but this one really lays out the war on sharing that underlies bills like SOPA (and its predecessors COICA, ACTA, and the DMCA). Some excerpts:

SOPA and PIPA…want to raise the cost of copyright compliance, to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs….

In order to fake the ability to sell uncopyable bits, the DMCA also made it legal to force you use systems that broke the copying function of your devices…they also made it illegal for you to try to re-set the copyability of that content. The DMCA marks the moment where the media industries gave up on distinguishing between legal and illegal copying, and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means….

PIPA and SOPA are round two. But where the DMCA was surgical – we want to go down into your computer, into your television set, your game machine, and prevent it from doing what they said it would do at the store – PIPA and SOPA are nuclear. They’re saying we want to go anywhere in the world and censor content.

If you’re trying to explain the issues regarding SOPA to someone else, try showing them this. Yes, it’s 14 minutes, but still much more concise and comprehensible than anything I could accomplish in a much longer conversation.