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[14 Feb 2012|07:49pm] |
So I am just gonna squee for a sec:
I BOUGHT A HOUSE! It is lovely and I only had a mild panic attack watching my bank account go from $10K to $100.
Now, Happy Valentine's Day! Do this!
Reply to this and I will tell you what I love about you.
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[19 Jan 2012|05:49am] |
Alright, I know I don't really use this thing often, but I'm going to jump up on a soap box here because it's something that could possibly affect us all. Apologies if I come off sounding patronizing, but a lot of my friends on Facebook had no clue about this or how it could affect them.
I'm not cutting this because I think it's important. Again, sorry :(
If you visited tumblr, flickr, google, reddit or a myriad of other sites yesterday, you were probably subject to the great Internet blackout in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). These are billed as attempts to stop dirty pirates who steal all this money from the poor guy who wipes the floors on the set of Glee (and that's a valid point), but it's actually measures that can change the Internet as we know it - and the reason I'm talking about it is because it affects the RPG community greatly!
It can put an end to our ability to RPG as we do right now.
The bills, among many things, would allow a copyright holder to have a website blacklisted if it links to infringing content. Currently, as long as sites comply with the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and take down any infringing content, they face no legal consequences for what their users do.
For these purposes, I'll use Harry Potter since most of you are HP fans.
How does this affect us? Well, everything we do is infringing on JKR's (and numerous other authors', actors', musicians, et.) content. JKR owns the rights to the characters Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Albus Dumbledore and all the other characters we know and love. She owns the rights to Hogwarts, Quidditch, Diagon Alley and all the places we set our (canon-compliant) games.
Let's talk about icons and PBs. Most icons come from television shows, movies or photo shoots which are obtained (usually) illegally and used for a purpose not approved by the original copyright holder. Let's not mention that Warner Bros holds the copyright to any images from the Harry Potter movies.
Under these bills, copyright holders could have Insanejournal, or any other site shut down for allowing us not only to post icons using photos we didn't take ourselves, but also for writing extensively about terms like Quidditch, Harry Potter etc. Yes, even if it's our own worlds, our own characters, our own plots. We're playing in her world, and she owns that world.
JK Rowling has been incredibly kind when it comes to fan fiction, but not all writers are. Consider the late Anne McCaffery who wrote the Dragon Riders of Pern series - she widely disappointed fans by sending them cease and desist letters to stop them from using her world as a backdrop for their adventures. When she finally came around to the idea of having a fandom, she set a ton of logical, but cold-sounding rules for using her world.
She's not the only one - even JKR has sent legal notices! And Anne Rice, too.
From fanhistory.com
"Anne McCaffrey had been aware, based on interviews, of fan fiction since 1985. As fan fiction moved on-line, she, in consultation with lawyers, created a licensing policy for people who wished to write fan fiction in her universe. Given all this, it does not come as a surprise that in 1997, a Dragons of Pern fan fiction site recieved a cease and desist letter from McCaffrey's legal representatives.
One community hit especially hard was the Anne Rice fan fiction community, based on Usenet. In 1999, Anne Rice threatened a number of fans with legal action. [2] This was followed up with cease and desist letters being sent to fan fiction sites and, in 2000, a personal statement being published on her website saying that she was hurt by people writing fan fiction based on materials. This all culminated in 2001 with FanFiction.Net recieving a cease and desist letter.
On January 22, 2003, J. K. Rowling herself sent a cease and desist letter to www.psa.shadow-wrapped.net.
Sure, I get it. These people don't want us making money off their creations. They deserve every penny for having such brilliance. But, imagine if SOPA/PIPA was around when McCaffery was going legal. Rather than contacting users, she could just have Yahoo Groups, Insanejournal, EZBoards or any other site taken offline. Everything we've done? Gone.
No warning, nothing. Now, would big sites like Google, Youtube, Insanejournal or Facebook be immune from this law? There's nothing that says so for sure. It's likely, as I can't see anyone actually being able to take them down, but the point is that is what the law is intended to do. They'll do it to small sites, they'll do it to anyone they can. It's intended to make websites police their users for any minor infringements so they don't have to.
This will hurt everyday people like you and me way more than it will hurt so-called pirates.
So what can you do? If you live in the US, write to your representatives! Call them! If you're like me an lazy or don't know who you should be writing to, visit http://americancensorship.org/ and put in your information, they'll do it for you?
Don't live in the US? Tell your friend who do to do something about this! Link them to my post (I left it public!) Congress has shelved PIPA, but they are voting on SOPA on MONDAY. 35 members of the House have come out against it, and it takes 41 to stop it completely!
/soapbox <3
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