Response to Bill Maher's comments on SOPA, made on the 01.20.12 Episode of "Real Time"

Hey Bill, I generally love all your work and watch your show religiously (haha sorry :P). Now, we both hold opinions that rather closely allign with one another on average, I've noted... And when we do disagree, I often still can respect your opinions as they'll typically be well informed, grounded and they typically will have a point behind them, where I can at least somewhat see where you are coming from, some educated point you are trying to make. On Fridays show however, with your SOPA comments, I certainly could not. I'm sure I'm not the first to call you on this, but I really have to do my part in hopefully making you see the error of your ways.

Right off the bat, you conceded you had not read this bill, and made it very clear you supported it simply because you're "against piracy". Congrats, you just did the equivilant of supporting the Patriot Act because you were "feeling patriotic". You knew nothing about this bill's content, yet you supported it... Come on, Maher, you're smarter than that!

I'm writing this message (on the off chance you read your FB wall) because I'm unsure if you realize just who your fanbase is, and just how much you put at risk in stating so ill-informed an opinion. Your primary demographic would seem to be the one I fit into - Males in their 20s. There's one thing MANY 20-something year old males love, and invest much of our time in: The internet. I fear that Friday night, you risked alienating a LARGE chunk of your (really quite geeky) fan base. You don't wanna piss off the internet, nor do you wanna piss off Anonymous (which goes hand in hand with the web and any threats to web freedom), as many of your fans are "from the internet", as it were....

In showing ignorance (ignorance at best... indifference at worst) to this bill's contents and possible reprecussions, you honestly risk complely discrediting yourself - This bill was, as is obvious from even a cursorary glance, written by old white men who know absolutely nothing about the intenet, how it works or its infrastructure. These old white men have nooo idea how horrible an idea this bill is, they only know how sweet that free lobbiest candy tastes.

It's horrifying just how little the mainstream media has covered the topic of SOPA - It's a topic your show made the horrible decision to ignore until now - And then to fumble after picking up the ball so horribly - To make comments supporting the bill while not even knowing what it entails - It just seems so unlike what you claim to stand for, I must say it almost seems rather suspicious. It's no secret that Time Warner, the parent company of HBO is in full support of SOPA - Hmmmm... I can only hope this was done "at gunpoint", as it were...

I suppose I'll finally get a bit into INSANE proposals contianed within this act... Under SOPA, any site that so much as LINKS (even if said link is posted by a third party, say as a comment) to another site that contains links to copyrighted material (however small an amount, even a single song) - This website could be reported, and INSTANTLY taken down - with no trial, no warrant, no form of recourse....


Lets illustrate this even better for the layman (a group im forced to presume you fall under). Lets talk for a second about YOUR blog - I'm certain you never post nay copyrighted material onto it. This does not matter. Lets pretend for a moment I wasn't a fan Of Bill Maher, but rather, Bill Maher really pissed me off and I didn't think he should be on the internet anymore - I happen to be a musician, and have a many recordings that I own the copyrights for... It'd be as easy as uploading one of my songs to a file hosting site, posting a link to said song in the comments section of your blog, and then reporting your website as hosting my copyrighted material, demanding it be shut down. Your blog could be taken swiftly offline with no trial, no form of recourse, no anything. Can you really claim full ownership and responsibility for the content of every single comment posted to your blog? Of course not. Does this illustrate the chilling effect this bill can have?

This isn't even taking into consideration just how unenforcable this is. Look at a site like Youtube, it has tons of copywritten material - Thus, going by the letter of this bill, freaking YOUTUBE could be completely pulled from the web - Youtube not big enough for you, how about Google? Google has something called "Google Cache" - Basically, as Google goes around mining information from the millions of sites it catelogues - It also saves a "snap shot" of that site into it's "cache" - This feature allows you to do things like view a site after it's been taken down by viewing the google cache snapshot (sorry for the extreme laymans terms, Maher's statements just make me feel he kinda needs this) - Now by design, this means Google takes tons of snapshots of copyrighted material (people are always focusing on music and video, but news articles, pictures etc. can all just as easily have copyrights) - Google has massive (in a way, "pirated") databases of pretty much every news article on the internet (not to mention their cache inevitibly has some trulyyy illegal things on it, like child pornography and the like) - Are you going to be the one to lead the charge twoards tearing google down off the internet? I doubt this, and I doubt that would ever happen, as Google is huge. Bigger than many governments. This bill would mostly be used to target smaller websites that don't employ a massive team of laywers. This also calls into question it's ethics.

I mean, you did your enough research on your own to learn about the NDAA act, and the horrifying can of worms it opened - And yet you failed yourself and your viewers on SOPA - Both acts share certain similarities, the conspiculous blackout by mainstream media when it came to covering them (until protest and resistance to both acts made this impossible), an innocuous name along with the claim that each's purpose is something rather difficult to argue against - Be it terrorism or piracy...

Anyhow, this rant is already getting kinda laughably huge - Something we internet people like to call "TL;DR" - I still love you Bill Maher, and still love "Real Time" - I just eally hope in the future you try keep informed about things like this - Especially when theyre things that matter so much to your young, savvy fanbase. I posted this as help/a warning - I don't wanna see you lose viewership over what could have been mere oversight.