You'll hear a lot this week about website operators protesting the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Much of the chatter focuses on huge sites and companies like Google, Ebay/PayPal, and Wikipedia. But I'd like to take a moment to speak on behalf of the thousands of sites more like mine.
I run BabyNameWizard.com and NameCandy.com with my partner Jennie Baird, each of us working out of our homes. We have a handful of awesome writers who blog for NameCandy part time. That's it. That's the whole company. And we operate 30,000+ pages of content, almost all of which invite readers to share their own insights and experiences about baby names.
As writers ourselves, we care about intellectual property. Our site terms make it clear that you may NOT post copyrighted material, and in the few cases where another publisher has spotted one of our users violating this rule, we've taken the offending material down immediately and contacted or blocked the user.
But I'm sure you can see that it's literally impossible for us to review every comment users make on tens of thousands of pages. And even if we did, how could we be 100% certain that a user's musings about Nicole Richie in comments on a NameCandy blog post weren't copied from some old gossip magazine?
Yet under the terms of SOPA, if that gossip magazine were feeling protective of its Nicole Richie insights -- or maybe just didn't like another site writing about celebrity baby names -- it wouldn't just tell us to take the comment down. It could pull the plug on our whole website: we'd go black. (In theory, the target of the legislation is "foreign" websites. In theory. So fine, imagine this site's based in the U.K., the situation is no different.)
Isn't this a little nuts? You can't give every content creator the power to shut down any competitor that fails to do the impossible...can you?
Please take a moment to see where your congressperson stands on SOPA, and let them know how you feel. Thanks. (And back to the baby names tomorrow!)
Comments
It's good to see a non-technical web site that is worried and talking about SOPA.
I know Laura doesn't want too many political and non-baby name comments on here. However, I have made numerous comments on other blogs regarding the Lego friends controversy and now there is this and I wonder if I could state my position in terms of baby names now.
In the US there are no rules about baby names. People are free to name their babies Christopher or Kohen or Aashlynne or Abcde. On the premise that everyone wants the right to be heard and have validation for their individualism, they name their infants a unique name. (How they create the uniqueness is besides the point). Now extrapolating this, every organization needs the world to hear their visions. This makes every person/group feel "special". I'm not saying that we should all start being racists but it is getting ridiculous lately. By making EVERYONE special you are in turn assuring that NO-ONE is special. Didn't this new generation read the Sneetches by Dr. Suess? So coming back around to names, by giving your child a unique name like Abcde there will always be someone trying to outdo you (be more "special/unique") unless we stop this madness. Any combination of letters allowed to become a name is just silly but these days you have to either allow everything or nothing.
May all the SOPA supporters be voted out of office as soon as possible, and may their names become suddenly unpopular names for babies ^_^
Zoerhenne, all too true, but we Americans cherish our freedom to be stupid. Better a million stupid ideas/visions/names to every one gem than the censoring of one good idea/vision/name for the purposes of rules and regs, beauty, intellectual property, whatever. And actually, I agree with that.
Thanks Beth. I appreciate the support and you are right too. The LEGO issue and the SOPA issue are actually 2 sides of the same coin. It now seems that the SOPA bill has lost much of its support. Let's keep going to knock some sense into the rest of the issues.
Good post and right to the point. It was right in everyday life as well.
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It's nice to see smaller companies and websites speak up on the new SOPA Act. It is going to affect a lot of smaller companies and businesses. Of course we know how politicians work, this may be defeated for now but eventually it will come back just slightly altered.
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