SOPA - The Best Defense May Be a Good Offense.

Summary: If SOPA/PIPA passes, it needs to be enforced on the very supporters who would be responsible for its passage.

I will attempt to keep this short, but I thought it important to weigh in on the issue here, as today is the day of the protests (Good Luck to Wikipedia, Reddit, and all the others who have gone dark today). One additional way to fight SOPA and PIPA, aside from the masses expressing displeasure to your elected representatives, is for the big media companies who support SOPA/PIPA to learn about something called the "Law of Unintended Consequences" (links to Wikipedia, which, yes, I know is dark today!).

What if SOPA and PIPA passed... do these media companies really think that their sites, all of the web properties they own and maintain, are infringement-free? How many small artists have had their work stolen and don't know it (stock photos, stock video, art and branding, etc.)? If all of the artists who create these works were to gather search for their material on the big media websites, I'm sure they would find something. It might be small... or it might not be. Maybe just an illegal sampling was done on some minor recording artist's latest track. Maybe video of something innocuous, like a train or plan, or landscape, was used in a movie and not paid for. Maybe a work of art is on display, or used as wallpaper... somewhere, on just about ever media site, will be a copyright violation.

Taking it there, what if the artists of the world found these minor infringements, and what if there were some law firms that would take these cases to court to shut down the domains of the offender? The net results - the big supporters of SOPA/PIPA would be hoisted on their own petard and shut down, losing millions of dollars per day. Maybe, just maybe, the best way to stick it to these offensive supporters of censorship would be to shut them down with their own law... and watch how fast they support repeal.

If you're an artist, start checking the websites of companies supporting SOPA. A list is here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/76259944/SOPA-Supporters

If you find a violation, where the big companies supporting SOPA/PIPA have actually violated the proposed law as it stands now, comment here with a link to your contact info and another to the offending information. If this horrible legislation goes through, I'll try and find a lawyer to take the fight to the very people who sought to bring SOPA/PIPA into existence.