In November of 2011, the United States Congress introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. The goal of the act is, of course, benign on the surface: it is meant to curtail the violation of copyright that occurs on an almost routine basis on the internet. However, the act’s broadly-worded authorities and overtly punitive enforcement measures create the single most tyrannical threat to the protections conferred by the US Constitution’s First Amendment since the day the Constitution was ratified.

To sum up: SOPA would place the responsibility for copyright enforcement on the internet service providers (ISPs) who serve that content to their users. A copyright holder, upon receiving knowledge of infringing material being made available, need only contact the ISP or site administration to have the offending site “black-holed”, or simply cut off from the internet. If the server exists outside the United States, however, ISPs would be required to block access to the site by users within the United States. ISPs will be legally bound to comply immediately and without question. There is no due process involved, no fact-checking, no assurance of fair use rights, no recourse for blacklisted service providers, and no consequences for erroneous blocking.

The fact of the matter is, even if we disregard that the internet is a global resource, this places a tool for restriction of speech that has the force of law behind it in the hands of a non-governmental agent, specifically content producers. Let me restate that: it gives the power of the law to a private entity with zero accountability.

I’m sure this would never be used for nefarious purposes!

It’s not a difficult stretch to see the law being perverted to the complete elimination of freedom of expression rights. Not many people know this, but the speech that practically defined Martin Luther King, Jr.’s career– the “I Have A Dream” speech– is under copyright in the United States until 2038. Under SOPA, an executor of Dr. King’s estate would have the power to erase from the internet any site that bore any significant portion of the speech. Lest you think that this is an unlikely occurrance, recall that under the current US copyright laws– even without SOPA– an entity must actively engage in protecting its copyrights, or else risk losing them and having the work pass into the public domain. Currently, that would mean sending a DMCA takedown notice to the company hosting the offending material; a process that, despite having its own flaws, at least has measures to dispute or bring to legal attention the case. Under SOPA, no matter how well-intentioned that executor might be, he would have no choice but to start wiping websites off the map, regardless of the good intentions of those taking inspiration from Dr. King’s words.

The nightmare scenario, however, is far more chilling. The bill as written could be interpreted to allow content producers to deliver legally-binding takedown notices without judicial oversight. Now, ideally, the content producers would utilize this power to act against all infringements equally; but in practice, applying the oft-stated phrasing of Murphy’s Law that claims “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”, the content producer might be disinclined to press its charges against infringements that show its product in a positive light, and may crack down hard on negative or dissenting opinions of the product. This selective enforcement is tantamount to censorship; imagine a world where nobody could have said, for example, that William Hung was a bad singer. (I’m reaching for an example, here, because I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes for the sake of making a point; also, while I respect him for trying, dude just can’t sing.)

I don’t begrudge content producers the right to protect their work. It would be awfully damn hypocritical of me to do so, as I am a content producer. However, that does not imply that content producers have the right to circumvent the law. Nor does it mean that content producers are no longer subject to the same mechanics of the free market that tangible-goods industries are.

Peter David has voiced a rather interesting opinion on SOPA. Mr. David, who is a well-known and respected science fiction and comics writer, concurred with the general opinion that SOPA’s enforcement language is overbroad and damaging to the health of information freedoms. However, he also claims that the responsibility lies with the public, who both generates the unauthorized copies and consumes them. Without the ravenous demand for pirated works, Mr. David claims, SOPA would be unnecessary.

I certainly respect Mr. David’s opinion, and I agree that there is a significant market for low- or zero-cost works. I must, however, respectfully refute his implication that SOPA, or an act like it, is the only reasonable response to the upsurge in copyright violations. There is an alternative, rooted in the most classic tenet of capitalism: if there is demand, supply that demand.

In 1999, many a person became familiar for the first time with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The organization came to public attention when, in response to the overwhelming success of fledgling filesharing tool Napster, it began filing lawsuits against individuals it believed were the biggest providers of unauthorized copies of music under its oversight. The stories are, by now, legendary: computer-illiterate grandmothers being sued for tens of thousands of dollars in damages; universities taking pro- and anti-filesharing stances; and a myriad of filesharing tools being produced in the meantime, including the now-ubiquitous BitTorrent protocol. The RIAA was also firing back, trying to stem the tide of unauthorized copies displacing sales, but very few of its efforts were successful.

Shortly thereafter, in 2003, Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store, which laid out an ambitious plan: each track would cost 99 cents, and would be (legally) free-and-clear. (We’ll set aside the issue of DRM and lock-in for now, as it is only tangential to the point.) Critics thought that the service would fail, citing the aphorism “Why would you pay for something you could get for free?” Astonishingly, the service caught fire among Mac users, and when it was introduced to Windows users later that year it became even more popular. Rivals such as Amazon and Wal-Mart began offering competing services with lower price points and in some cases differing artist lineups. Soon, downloads were counted for the purposes of “top-40″ charts. Today, iTunes and digital sales are the largest portion of the music industry’s revenues.

The point– and it’s not a socially-outlier one, nor is it incompatible with traditional American values by any stretch of the imagination– is that piracy, be it of music, movies, video games, or otherwise, is a symptom of the supply not meeting the demand entirely. Piracy is undoubtedly a real problem for the entertainment industry, but SOPA and its related bill PIPA is not the solution. History, and very recent history at that, has shown that the solution is not to protect the old business model, but to adapt to changing situations and emerging technologies. The solution is not to tighten the grip on what you have, but to open your palm and let more money in.

In the recent days running up to the protest actions being implemented, many members of Congress and the Executive Branch have issued statements of opposition to the SOPA bill as written. President Obama has himself indicated that he will veto the Act should it somehow cross his desk. The problem is that the bill will not come up for a vote until next week, and that its PIPA counterpart will be in committee until February. That’s plenty of time for people to think that the battle ends today, and for the outrage to subside into apathy. Worse, it’s entirely possible that SOPA/PIPA are Trojan Horses meant to soften resistance to a less-draconian but still irrevocably harmful plan to implement these far-reaching powers, or something like them, without sufficient oversight or recourse. I’ve made calls to my representatives in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and I urge you to do the same.

Piracy is a problem, yes. But tyranny is not the answer.

1) Nothing older than 2008 will be bought on Blu-Ray unless it’s remastered, out of print otherwise, or offers some benefit over a DVD copy besides picture quality. Anything older than about 2008 probably wasn’t filmed with any kind of HD resolution in mind, and so it’s pointless to waste the money in order to see high-resolution film grain.
2) No TV series will EVER be bought on Blu-Ray. This is so I have the option of ripping the series to my iPhone or iPad and watching it in a mobile environment.
3) The only movies I’ll buy on Blu-Ray are ones where the visual effects are strong enough to necessitate the high quality. So far that’s been Inception, Summer Wars, and the new Star Trek. The Rebuild of Evangelion movies get a pass due to the CG and the fact that they’re the tinkered-with re-release versions and not the theatrical ones.
4) When possible, buy them used. This is just common sense.

The sole exception to the rules has been the ROD boxed set, but even that grudgingly fits Rule 1 because Aniplex decided not to release a DVD version. I only picked it up because I was able to get a decent deal on it, dropping it down to what the individual discs would go for on eBay. But it was still under protest.

I don’t think that the format has legs enough to completely supplant DVD. What I’m seeing more and more stores do, however, is scale back their physical media sections considerably owing to the fact that there are more people streaming stuff online, and owning a disc is seen increasingly as an oddity. Yeah, I do kind of hope that streaming catches on, but I still like the idea of having a physical disc on the very likely chance that contract squabbles take away a movie I want to see just before I want to stream it. Streaming services are too fragmented and volatile right now for me to entrust any of them with my sole desire to watch new movies and so forth. Maybe that’ll change, but I truly doubt it.

To this end, I’ve been elbow-deep in the Dungeons and Dragons Compendium, which is a great resource for the average DM. There’s just a few hiccups, and that’s that, for the most part, there aren’t really a whole hell of a lot of variety of monsters available to players at Level 1. More immediately, getting data out of the compendium and into a workable sheet for use at the table is not exactly the easiest thing in the world, particularly if you need to adjust a monster’s level down a notch or two in order to make it a fair fight. (And yeah, there’s gonna be one encounter that just plain won’t be a fair fight, because what’s life without a little risk?) To date, I tried setting up an OpenOffice template for that purpose, arranging the carefully-constructed stat blocks and going from there.

The Cheshire Cat, in American McGee’s Alice, said: “There’s a nasty name for people who insist on doing things the hard way.” To that end, I snagged a couple of utilities that make life much, much easier.

The first is a bookmarklet found via NewbieDM that turns on editable mode within the browser window. Basically, once you find the monster you want in the DDI Compendium, right click it and view the frame in a new window or tab. Then, click the bookmarklet and start editing. In Firefox 4.0 you don’t get to see the insertion marker, so be sure you click before you start typing– or better yet, highlight only what you want to edit. It’s nondestructive, so you’re not twiddling bits on WOTC’s servers or anything. The only downside is that it doesn’t play well with javascript-heavy pages, which is why you want the monster in its own, disposable tab. Great, so you can alter monsters, but what about copying them to an encounter sheet?

That’s where the Pixlr Grabber add-on comes into play. Pixlr can specify a region of the browser window, and either save it to disk as a PNG or copy it to your clipboard. From there, you can paste it into your favorite word processor or page layout tool and arrange it as needed or desired. Make sure you do a test run to see how big/small the text needs to be.

Those should cut down a TON of the manual labor needed for me to get the encounters ready. At this point the hardest part is figuring out how to avoid sending my players against yet another kobold horde.

And then the options should be “No”, “Hell No”, and “Screw All This, I’m Going Outside”.

Everyone knows that ones and zeroes attract dust no matter where they are. That’s why the insides of computer cases are always so horribly filthy.

I did mention I could do that while I slept, right? ‘Cause I can, and will…

The short version is that I feel this is the best smartphone on the market right now.

( Okay, let me start with the things that I dislike about it…. » )