First thought: "Well <i>of course</i> WSJ would be pro-SOPA".<p>Second thought: "But just because you would expect it of them doesn't make them wrong. What points do they make?"<p>Final thought: "Oh look, a paywall. Oh well..."<p>It seems their mission to overzealously block content on the internet was impeded by their decision to overzealously block content on the internet.
This: "One of America's most respected newspapers has come out on the side of copyright owners..." really annoys me. I am a copyright owner. I make money from that fact. I am against SOPA.<p>Setting up a false dilemma of "copyright owners" vs "others" is incorrect and evil spin. Everyone be sure to note that many of the sites and people against SOPA (e.g. Google, Tim O'Reilly, etc) are all major copyright holders and beneficiaries when you talk with people about this.
This is meta, but as of right now every single comment on this article is about why the WSJ would claim to believe SOPA is a good idea, not what their actual argument is. A decent fraction of these comments cite Rupert Murdoch and/or phone hacking.<p>That's not very productive. Anyone on the pro-SOPA side can say exactly the same thing about e.g. Google. One of Google's major divisions, Youtube, was built in part on piracy. And Google itself does help people find pirated content; that's not something immoral, and they do make it difficult, but Google benefits from some copyright infringement in the sense that it means they're a better default search engine, since some fraction of queries are for copyright-violating content.<p>And the WSJ article does make a similar point:<p><i>Wikipedia has never blacked itself out before on any other political issue, nor have websites like Mozilla or the social news aggregator Reddit... They've taken no comparable action against, say, Chinese repression.</i><p>This is not the first thing so awful that websites choose to take such action--it's the first awful thing that <i>threatens them</i> so much.<p>The WSJ also points out that the most egregious part of SOPA--DNS-level censorship--was removed in the latest draft. They don't make an exceptional argument, but they do make a superficially reasonable case; someone unfamiliar with the way the Internet works would likely find it pretty convincing.<p>SOPA/PIPA is an awful, awful idea. But if the WSJ claims that it's a good idea, and you claim that the WSJ only says so because corrupt, then you lose by default. The WSJ can have a good argument that defends their economic interests, or that is hypocritical in light of what they've been caught doing in the past. SOPA opponents are in a very similar situation.
<i>The e-vangelists seem to believe that anybody is entitled to access to any content at any time at no cost—open source. Their real ideological objection is to the concept of copyright itself, and they oppose any legal regime that values original creative work. The offline analogue is Occupy Wall Street.</i><p>That alone is enough to render the article useless, a very bad piece for a generally high-quality blog (can we just call newspapers blogs from now on? it's technically the same thing)<p>On the other hand, the internet doesn't yet offer a good way for creators to get rewarded for their work. Donations are too arbitrary, itunes despite its popularity is tied to music corporatism and so is spotify. What other startups are working in novel ways to monetize intellectual property?
I used to read the WSJ regularly, but stopped when their editors came out so obsequiously in favor of the bailout in 2008, after years of rejecting government intervention. Even this editorial is a farce. How often does the WSJ use the phrase "rights" in a positive way outside this context?
Of course it does. It's a Murdoch paper, and Murdoch is a fascist. All Murdoch's outlets operate as a kind of Pravda for American neo-fascism.<p>(I am not using the term fascism hyperbolically. Murdoch is, I think, properly classifiable as an authoritarian collectivist -- a fascist.)
Pretty much cannot trust the position of the traditional medias, like WSJ, on SOPA. They have a clear conflict of interest since their owners underwrite the legislature.<p>Just treat them as propaganda.
What's not at all surprising about this is that the WSJ is positioning SOPA as an anti-piracy bill and not as a bill that gives tacit acceptance to the assertion that government controls of information channels is acceptable in a free society.<p>Also the WSJ being <i>One of America's most respected newspapers</i> hasn't been true since Murdoch purchased it and started inserting opinion into front page news stories.
It's a Murdoch paper, what else did you expect?<p>Off Topic: Whenever I read WSJ I always think of Weekly Shounen Jump and then I'm like that makes no sense, this has to be about the Wall Street Journal. It's never about Manga.
TFA from CNet begins "One of America's most respected newspapers" in big text, forgetting to mention that, well CNet is part of CBS Interactive and CBSi is part of... you probably get my drift.
Ok I think I understand now, so I can't link to copyrighted material in any way or my site will be pulled, but I can hack into peoples mobile phones right?
For some reason this sentence jumped out at me:<p>"Some lawmakers have noted that PIPA and SOPA would not affect anyone of the Web sites participating in the blackout."<p>I assume the argument being made here is that they're domestic sites and would not be affected by the legislation. And since they're not pirating anything what do they have to worry about. I could see someone reading it and thinking this is much to do about nothing. But this bill really puts pressure on domestic sites to comply and as we all know will just push the pirate sites to find ways around the law. So really, the sites most affected by these laws will be domestic and law-abiding.