SOPA: Our Stance

If we don’t play our cards right, our website could be black forever.

Usually Anobium tries to avoid the hot-button issues. Our interest lies in other forms of artifice. But this is one place where we have to take a stand, because it’s cutting into our goddamned dinner.

We’ll keep our speech short:

SOPA is the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act.‘ It’s a vaguely worded piece of legislation which, in theory, is intended to put a stop to the illegal distribution of copyright’d work. Fair enough. But it’s more complicated than that.

Aside from the issue of felony-level punishments for simple violations of the proposed act, which – in theory – might be as simple as posting a YouTube video to Facebook, the act is full of errant technical assumptions.

Why does a bill like this exist? Though our founding fathers made sure to use language encouraging the separation of church and state, nobody ever questioned the dangers of associating business and state. SOPA is an act authored and articulated by lawmakers who would benefit professionally (that is, financially) from the act’s reification and implementation. The Judiciary Committee released this list of companies and organizations who are in support of SOPA. It wouldn’t be hard to find what politicians are invested-in or supported-by the faces behind this list of names.

So we darken our website along with thousands of others who are doing the same thing. There has been some good news regarding top-level legislative opposition to SOPA, but we have to wonder: what’s after SOPA? Because the Internet is so unregulated and well-traveled, the potential for profit is immeasurable. And sometimes it seems that the fool is the person who tries to stand down the tides of Gross Annual Income. We might be able to stop SOPA, but will this weaken the monster?

This is the first of many terrifying battles, but sometimes, nations have no choice but to go to war.

Ours is an age of transformation. Anobium, as a publisher and burgeoning multimedia resource, welcomes the challenge of cultural evolution with our heels firmly burrowed into this filthy topsoil. Jettison the top 40 and the best-seller lists and the urinal commercials and the pay-per view channels and build your own fucking world.

Call and e-mail your senators. Play the machine to beat the machine.