We’re officially breaking one of the biggest rules of Hello With Cheese today – No politics.

What you might not know is that I’m an oddly political person. I like to do things like read about policy decisions or send letters to my congresspeople. Heck, I actually know who my congresspeople are by name. But when I’m telling funny jokes about Batman or Doctor Who or Bugs Bunny, you don’t need to hear about my politics.

Then SOPA and PIPA came along. You’re going to hear a lot about them today. Reddit does a nice summation of SOPA at this link. I can’t really top that. By the way, SOPA is the bill in the House of Representatives right now. PIPA is a similar bill in the Senate (apologies to our international readers, but I understand some of you are very nervous about this).

Right now, both bills are in committee. They’re not even being voted on the floor of their respective bodies. That’s good. I’d love to see them die in committee. For those that forgot their Schoolhouse Rock, a bill needs to get out of committee, then pass in both the House and Senate. In the case of PIPA and SOPA, if one passes each house they’ll then slap another committee together to iron out all the differences, and then both the House and Senate re-vote on this hybrid Bill. Then that bill needs to be signed into Law by the President.

So why do I hate this bill enough to break a rule of HWC? I’m an oddball in terms of webcomics – I like Copyright law. I like protecting my IP. So shouldn’t I be all over a bill that’s called the “Protect IP Act”? Maybe, if that’s actually what it did. The problem with any law designed to stop something that’s illegal is that if it’s illegal, that means there’s already a law in place to stop it. And the new law can easily create unintended consequences (or maybe intended consequences).

By far the most repugnant part of this bill is how it would be enforced. If someone deems a site to be “rogue,” they can get it shut down for up to a year before actually proving if it was rogue or not. There can be lots of ways to call a site rogue. Say someone links a pirating site in my comments. Or maybe I go nuts and link it directly from a blog post. Boom, rogue site.

But there’s a far bigger grey area – that existing Copyright law. I’m very, very familiar with fair use and parody law. And so are corporate lawyers. They also love throwing around cease and desists against websites, even if they’re legally in the clear. To this day, I’m still annoyed that Penny Arcade didn’t go to court and counter-sue over their Strawberry Shortcake comic (for one, I would have actually been able to read it, and wouldn’t have accidentally doubled up on the joke in the first 10 HWC scripts). In a SOPA/PIPA-beefed up world, they don’t need C&Ds any more. At any point, they can go nuclear on a site, claiming it’s a copyright infringement. And all it’ll take is one judge not paying attention to the current copyright law, and HWC is shut down for a year.

And when that happens, it’ll be worse than a redacted bar over the title.

So what can we do? We don’t have lobbyists. But we have numbers.
First, go ahead and email your representative about SOPA, and your senators about PIPA.
But know that email is their most ignored form of communication. So:
-Call their offices. Be polite. You’re probably going to talk to a staffer that’s really a college kid intern. But that intern has to log each call made. Be sure to tell them you’re against the legislation, and be sure to tell them what town or zip code you live in.
-Write their offices. The old stamp and letter format. Every one of those letters gets looked at by another staffer. And they physically pile up, making quite a statement.
-If possible, try to meet with them. In my particular case, I’ve been trying to meet with Sen. Ben Cardin. He’s one of the sponsors of PIPA. Initially, I was planning on ranting a bit against him. But on Friday, he released an official statement saying he’d vote against PIPA unless it’s amended. I still want to meet with him, and I’d rather he just give a blanket No against PIPA. But I do understand his logic on not removing his sponsorship. Right now, he’s no longer on the committee that PIPA is in front of. But by holding on to his sponsorship, he’s still involved in the process.
-Sen. Ben Cardin, if you’re reading this, please get back to me about setting up a meeting about PIPA and other IP-related legislation. I am a small business in Maryland, and I’m looking to expand in 2012, possibly tripling my current workforce. But PIPA is dangerous to those plans.
-International readers: For now, I guess the main thing to do is hope we don’t screw this up. It affects you by setting dangerous precedents, and it affects you by hurting content providers like me and O. And we’ll do our best to keep fighting the good fight.