Life post-SOPA?

I had couple reminders over the last few weeks of how messy attributions and permissions already are – so what about life if SOPA passes?

a) My book editors went through and highlighted several quotes from articles which exceeded 50 words. I shortened them so we would not need specific permissions – we already provide credit citations in the book. Far more messy were music lyrics and photos. I had a 2 line quote from Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. My publisher deleted it. Forget 50 words, the music industry has a zero word policy. Everything needs specific permission. We were going to have an interesting photo for the case studies in each chapter (you can see several I had lined up if you scroll down the excerpts here). But getting permissions from a couple was difficult – so there will be no photos at all in the printed book.

b) On New Florence I posted a blog on Citi’s commercial “Somebody left the door open”. The scenery, the climbing and the song are all inspirational. CNN’s Jeanne Moos did a piece which was part parody, part feature on the artists. My post embedded on the blog a YouTube video of that CNN piece. 3 days ago there were no problems – yesterday several readers alerted me the video had been pulled. I thought CNN had posted it. The YouTube message said there were numerous complaints against the person who had posted it. So, I changed my post to a YouTube post from Citi and a link to the CNN site for that segment.

As I reviewed the CNN site, I noticed in its 2 minute length it credits Citi, Getty Images, CBS 60 minutes, Carlos Mason, WMP and Libero. Technically, it should have also credited some websites including Twitter. Post-SOPA, they likely would.

I agree on the need to combat piracy. But we also need to rationalize “fair use” concepts. The way we are going we may end up with rolling credits after every 30 second commercial!