Though the two heavily debated pieces of legislation that dominated tech blog headlines these past few weeks have been put on hold, the Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) and the Protect IP Act (“PIPA”), it’s clear lawmakers will continue to work to pass bills with the intent to combat online piracy.
With that in mind, today’s Sunday Video revisits the potential consequences of passing SOPA in its current form. “In the end, the real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another,” Clay Shirky said in a TED talk delivered in January.
Shirky begins his 14-minute presentation with the story of a bakery unable to let children draw pictures of television cartoon characters for their cake decorations. He then gives an abbreviated history of the media lanscape and the legislation it lobbied for along the way.
“It turned out, we’re not really couch potatoes,” Shirky said. “We don’t really like to only consume.
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“We do like to consume, but every time one of these new tools came along, it turned out we also like to produce and we like to share. And this freaked the media businesses out, it freaked them out every time.”
Check out Shirky’s talk below and for our coverage of SOPA and PIPA in the Silicon Prairie see our SOPA and PIPA page.
Video credit: Video from TED on YouTube.
