Today's News Today

I'm so proud of one of the companies I often work with, Wikipedia, for its leadership today in the anti-SOPA/PIPA movement. There is evidence that what Wikipedia and other leading Internet companies did today will perhaps cause these well-intentioned, but dangerous bills to go back for revision, so that they never get the opportunity to cause much more harm than good.

Which is what would have happened had they been passed and signed into law.

Don't get me wrong. I oppose online piracy, just as fiercely as I oppose all forms of plagiarism. As a lifelong journalist, I have been victimized by plagiarists on a number of occasions. And the content that I constantly create has been stolen by many.

One funny story in this regard is something a former staffer of then Senator Al Gore told someone I know years ago. It seems that Gore had prepared a statement declaring that he had created the concept of a "circle of poison" to describe the process by which banned pesticides from the U.S. were being dumped in Third World countries.

In fact, that phrase was the title of my first book, co-authored with Mark Schapiro. I can assure you that Al Gore had nothing to do with it.

Of course, stealing ideas is not necessarily a crime -- people have done it since time immemorial. And, with the Internet, everything happens at hyperspeed, including the theft of intellectual property.

But SOPA and PIPA are not the right way to deal with piracy, stealing and copyright infringement.

Those of us whose only real assets are our intellectual skills, in the form of the ability to create original content, stand the most to lose from those who poach, and copy and exploit us.

But we also must stand on the front line of free speech, because without it, we wouldn't be creating content. We would be in jail.

My note to our legislative leaders is to try and write legislation that actually addresses real problems in ways that promise real solutions. Do your homework. Don't create sledgehammers to fix problems better attacked with a well-placed pencil lead.

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