Back to SOPA’s verbiage, where it describes those sites which rights-holders could have shut down as sites: “Dedicated to the theft of US property”.

I’ve already written about the problem of what it means to be “dedicated to”, since the subsequent verbiage clearly also targets any sites linking to sites that have this “dedication” to piracy.

Secondly, though, is the problematic word “theft”. This pithy sentence does not – in any way – illustrate the tremendous semantic struggle involved in the tug-of-war between rights-holder claiming that violating copyright equals “theft” and those who assert that you cannot “steal” something which can be replicated ad infinitum.

I’m not surprised to see SOPA reverting back to the same verbiage industry propaganda machines use: “piracy is theft, and theft is against the law” etc, etc. It’s simply saddening that any legislator would show no opposition to such a blanket, moronic assertion.

Let’s take an example. If copyright infringement were the same as theft; if indeed the term was wholly fungible with theft, then the title of “thief” become diluted to the point of irrelevance. Everyone who ever sang “Happy Birthday” at a ballpark or restaurant is a thief. Anyone who ever made a mix tape. Who ever used music or images in a PowerPoint (since the idea that someone would get permission for an internal PowerPoint presentation is absurd).

So if anything, such verbiage waters down what it means to be a thief, since we all – in some way – violate copyright. Of course, saying “theft” is supposed to hold more power and allow far less wiggle room than, say, indicting any sites “who in some way violate copyright”. There’s no teeth there. No drama. No immediacy. It’s too ambiguous.

And yet this is a far more accurate statement than SOPA’s verbiage.

Check back for part three of pulling back the curtain on SOPA’s verbiage, or read the last post, and hopefully even the few who indulge me by reading this will have a greater appreciation of how clearly one-sided this horrid bill is, and what that means for its future.