Losing Focus On SOPA – Lamar Smith’s Violation Doesn’t Matter
I’ve been really disheartened the last day or so to see Twitter and other social media talking about the minor copyright violation by Lamar Smith. It’s a distraction from the campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It’s been great to see stories of sites like Reddit confirming an 18th January blackout in protest against the legislation, and the likes of Google and Facebook considering it. So why are we losing focus on SOPA by pointlessly addressing a trivial issue instead?
The bill’s important, not the person
OK, here’s the story. The author of SOPA, Lamar Smith, was accused of copyright violation himself. A pre-SOPA version of his website uses a Creative Commons licensed image by DJ Schulte without correctly attributing the photographer. Cue every single SOPA related Tweet turning into a link to this article, as if it was some kind of silver bullet.
Instead of continuing to focus on SOPA, its huge flaws and dangers to free speech and a creative, entrepreneurial web, the argument’s suddenly been reduced to “look, Lamar Smith is a bad guy!” Everybody is talking about a mistaken copyright violation. Which means that everybody has stopped talking about what matters.
Lamar Smith could be the greatest paragon of virtue in Washington and SOPA would still be a terrible piece of legislation. It doesn’t matter whether he’s a hypocrite for the mistake on his website. All the focus on this issue merely distracts from SOPA itself.
It makes the opposition look small-minded
Here are two arguments against SOPA;
It’s a seriously flawed piece of legislation that will negatively impact American business and undermine free speech.
or…
Lamar Smith is a hypocrite.
I know which I find a more powerful motivator to oppose the legislation.
The triviality of using a minor “gotcha” moment as a focus of the anti-SOPA argument makes people think the issue itself is trivial. It’s not even a great proof of hypocrisy. “Congressman’s web designers make minor error in not attributing credit to otherwise free photograph”. Not exactly a Watergate moment.
Trying to censor the internet isn’t enough?
SOPA can certainly be stopped. If huge websites like Facebook and Google shut down then it’ll be a huge news story. These are sites used by the general public, rather than sites whose audience is more likely to be more heavily involved in digital/social media issues. The argument against SOPA is strong in terms of constitutional rights of free speech and in terms of potentially negative economic impact.
They’re trying to censor the internet. It’s an argument that people can understand, and which can be used to bring pressure to stop the legislation. Why waste that by instead talking about a picture that Lamar Smith used to have on his website?
If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to receive all the latest stories from Shiny Toy Robots?
