Last week was nothing short of insane. It was an emotional and informational roller coaster for my entire family. While I have lots to talk about on that front…that’s not what I’m going to do today. I will, soon, I promise, but not today.

I want to talk about censorship and regulating the internet, and the problematic way in which we discuss these issues. When I got the call from my mother that put everything else in my life on hold for a week, I was in the middle of something else. When I said, “This is not the post I meant to write today,” I quite literally had another post intended for the day; I had just sat down to record a vlog on SOPA and PROTECT IP when my mom called me.

Now that my brother’s situation is something that I can speak of in hindsight, I want to take a second for something that is very present. Rather than recording my own video, as I had planned, I want to bring you a few other things instead. If you spend enough time online that you read this blog, you’re probably somewhat familiar with this issue, so the first few things might be redundant.

First of all, for anyone with the patience and interest, you can read the full text of PROTECT IP (Senate) and the full text of SOPA (House). They are both worth reading in terms of understanding the scope of what is being introduced and the degree of ambiguity surrounding the rhetoric of this legislation.

Assuming few people will actually do that (fair) I’m now going to switch to a few other awesome videos on the subject. This video is a very serious but also very simple breakdown of what is at stake here. This video refers specifically to the Senate’s PROTECT IP version, but is equally applicable to the larger, more problematic House version, SOPA.

I am, admittedly, a cynic when it comes to the efficacy of reaching out to your representatives, a by-product of living in DC, I suppose. That said, part of this is a consequence of how passive many of us have become in terms of what it means to reach out and demand results.

First, you can and probably should go ahead and add your name/voice to these form letters against the bill, because it takes about five seconds to do so.

Avaaz has probably the most widely circulated such letter that you can sign onto. StopCensorship.org is compiling a list of names which Senator Wyden will read from the Senate floor to filibuster a vote on PROTECT IP. The makers of that video also have another such letter over at Fight For the Future.

Second, recognize that this is not enough. It takes about five seconds to do so and now that entertainment industry lobbyists are attempting to position this as job creating/protecting legislation, they will be able to rally unions to join in on this easy “activism” for their own cause. This is venturing off onto a tangent that comprise several posts of its own, so I’m going to leave it at that and simply say, “PLEASE GO ONE STEP FURTHER.”

A few suggestions that comprise something very far from an exhaustive list (additional suggestions welcome in the comments):

• Pick up the phone, call your representatives and ask to speak with the legislative assistant who deals with this issue.
• Write your own letter. Based on my experience, the form letters are organized in a nice little stack and then counted. It’s not as though someone is going to re-read that form letter however many times it is received. If something aesthetically and textually different comes in, however, that means another read — a new iteration of that message.
• …and then pass that along to your local paper, blog it, tweet it, etc., etc., just be VOCAL.

My bigger issue here, however, is that the very way in which we talk about copyright law in this country is problematic and the real problem is not so much this particular legislation, as the larger discourse around copyright and technology. Related to that, both halves of my absolute favorite YouTube channel, vlogbrothers, recorded videos on this. For a lighter turn in this conversation, here is Hank’s video:

This video touches on the problems with this particular legislative fight, but hints at some larger problems. The very fact of what it means to “copy” has become incredibly complicated in the current technological environment and yet all of the legislation passed around this subject (of which there is a great deal) keeps trying to talk about copies and property in a pre-internet framework. It is as if all that needs to be done is adding a few more definitions (which, if you’ve looked at either pieces of legislation, they devote a lot of space to definitions) and then we can go back to talking about these things like we’re talking about physical CDs and VHS tapes DVDs. This legislation is bad, but worse, the conversation from which it stems is inherently flawed.

Finally, I have been pushing this 2007 TED talk on any captive audience I can find for the last couple weeks, partially because Larry Lessig is just the best, but also because it sums up the broader problem I have with this sort of legislation. In the immediate sense, defeating this particular bit of legislation is important. But there remains a broader cultural problem with the way in which we discuss and handle intellectual property and until we can start reimagining that conversation, we are going to keep having this fight ad infinitum.

“As we see what this technology can do, we need to recognize you can’t kill the instinct that technology produces; we can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using it; we can only drive it under ground. We can’t make our kids passive again; we can only make them “pirates.” Is that good? We live in this weird time. This kind of age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law — and that’s what we are doing to our kids — they live life against the law, knowing they live it against the law.“

– Larry Lessig, 2007