Dorkgasm

Ask yourself this: Who is your favorite author and how did you first come to read their work?

Did you receive the book as a gift?
Did you check it out of the library?
Have you EVER checked a book out of the library?

Part of the problem with anti-piracy groups and laws is that they ignore the above example. I loved the original The Crow comic. I was loaned a copy in high school. We passed that book around until it was ragged. But then, when the film came out, we all went in droves. I saw the film four times in theaters, bought the soundtrack twice, and have owned several copies of the book. But that first taste? I didn't pay a dime. Someone SHARED it with me. Here's a few more things I tasted for free before spending a boatload of cash on them.

Neil Gaiman

I first read Mr. Gaiman while in high school. My friend Paul had just finished his JD and he and I worked at the same record store. He and I talked a bit about comics, and then he introduced me to Sandman: Seasons of Mist. Holy hell, I was hooked. I loved that comics could be more than capes and spandex. I stopped reading X-Men, boycotted Gen-13, and started reading Grant Morrison's Invisibles, Garth Ennis' Preacher, and eventually found great writers like Mike Carey, Brian Wood, and Brian K. Vaughn. I have paid tons of money to read most of Gaiman's body of work since then, and the work of many, many other similar writers, but that wouldn't have happened in a world where it was a crime to share what we've already paid for. How many readers would new authors lose in a SOPA/PIPA world?

Nine Inch Nails

I first heard of Nine Inch Nails thanks to MTV. They actually played videos back when I was a kid, and I immediately loved the thundering beat and crunchy guitars of Trent Reznor. That said, I had no clue who this band was or where to find their music. They didn't seem to sell it at K-Mart, and I was still too young to drive. Then a friend found out I liked the band, and he made me a copy of Broken. From there, I went to concerts, found record shops where I could buy the music myself, and most importantly, I copied that music on to tapes for anyone who asked or showed interest. Hell, I did the same with Dead Can Dance, Portishead, and a number of other bands. If I loved it, I wanted my friends to love it. Going to concerts is more fun with friends, right? These days, audio cassettes are dead, but the act of sharing isn't! Trent Reznor, for all the copying I did back before the internet, is filthy rich these days. He even won an Oscar last year, and you know what? He gives away a lot of his music. He's played with the record labels, anonymously issuing greatest hits albums and the DVD version of Closure on The Pirate Bay, and when he was free from the record labels entirely, he released The Slip absolutely for free. And you know what I did? I went out and still bought a physical copy. Piracy isn't killing the recording industry, but SOPA/PIPA certainly aims to kill the internet in the name of killing piracy. If the bill actually managed to work, it would likely do more harm than good when it came to the spread of new artists.

Akira

If you want to introduce people to animation as legitimate art for adults, look no further than Akira. Before I got old, we had these strange black rectangles called video tapes. My neighbor, a kid my age named Chris, copied Akira onto a tape and bugged the crap out of me to watch it. When I finally did, it opened a flood gate. I found Vampire Hunter D at a record store, and another friend became a huge Macross Plus fan. The thing is, these films weren't widely available here in the states. Much of Asian cinema still isn't. Hell, it's 2012 and Battle Royale is only now getting an official DVD release. I bought a copy from a bootlegger at a comic con somewhere. The fact is, marketing execs and movie studios control what we get to buy far too stringently. When the BBC finally started airing Doctor Who episodes the same day in the USA as they did in the UK, it was a sign that someone who worked there understood that fans who wanted to see the new episodes wouldn't patiently wait. The other day, Neil Gaiman himself tweeted about getting a bootleg copy of the latest episode of Sherlock. The BBC should know better by now, but until they do, even the people who stand to benefit from anti-piracy measures like SOPA/PIPA are circumventing the artificial system in place in order to acquire what they want.

Is this all starting to make sense? SOPA/PIPA, or really any other hard-line anti-piracy legislation is likely to do more harm than good. We all fall in love with various arts for various reasons, but more often than not, we do so without paying anyone a dime up front. Want my own work for free? Hit up http://straylightmag.com and look for it there. I hope you dig it and share it with friends. That isn't going to stop me from trying to make money on what I do though. If anything, I'm encouraged by it. The fact is, no stupid law will be able to shut down piracy, any more than politicians could hope to kill libraries, art galleries, or outdoor concerts. They're in panic mode, these companies that support SOPA/PIPA, but for them, the sky has been falling since the days of the player piano. As it turns out, we all still buy music at least once in a while, so maybe that wasn't a threat either.