Steve LeCouilliard contacted me on the weekend asking for a little help on a cause that I’ve increasingly been worried about. SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill aimed at fighting online piracy in all shapes and forms. Which in itself is not a bad thing. Creators deserve to be paid for what they do, and protections against out right theft should be in place. But in it’s current form SOPA goes too far. I could explain the whole thing, but I’ll just copy and paste a bit of the wikipedia subject on the matter:

The bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a felony. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

Protecting whole works would be a good thing but this would also make it illegal to post a a video of your child walking up stairs for the first time and have it set to ‘Eye of the Tiger‘. It would make it illegal to draw a picture of Batman and post it online. It would make your college’s lip dub that’s going viral on Youtube illegal. It would make it illegal to link to any one of those.

It scary when you find out that your online account or personal website can be deleted or blacklisted for hosting or linking any offending material. It gets scarier when you find out that a copyright holder can potentially have your Paypal account suspended because you had a donate button on the same site you hosted or linked the offending material. It gets even scarier when you find out that the restructuring needed to put these ‘protections’ in place would amount to the US equivalent of The Great Firewall of China. The government would have the ability to censor websites at their whim. At first to stop you from going to torrent sites, but could also block you from going to sites with anti US sentiments. The potential for censorship is huge!

I could ramble on for pages, but I won’t. Google is your friend (I think.) and here are some handy links to quickly catch up on the situation:

A handy infographic.

A Boing Boing article on the subject.

A Tech Dirt article on the hearings.

Some tools for taking action.

If you’re into the whole petition thing.

Back to Steve. Steve had an idea and asked for a little help in the graphic design end of things. He wanted to make a mock software expiration page for Freedom of Speech and post it online as a fun and slightly inflammatory image to get people talking and motivate them to educate themselves on the subject and hopefully help maintain a free and open internet where new ideas free expression and creative projects can be shared without fear of prosecution.

I liked his idea, so I set to work using a quick mockup Steve sent and went about creating the image at the top of article. Did some research and found out the fonts used in OSX windows, (Lucida Grande which is pretty close to Lucida Sans) and i doctored up some screen shots, established some margins and fake buttons and tossed in some text that was based on Steve’s original. After a few back and forths we made a good looking fake expiration and it was unleashed on the internet.

We had hopes that it would go viral to help spread the word, but you can’t force anything to go viral. You just have to put it up there, link to is as best you can, then see what happens.

This happened:

Almost did a spit take at work when I saw that. I’d never had an image go viral before and the fact that Wil Wheaton, one of my favorite and respected strangers I follow online, (That sounded creepy.) helped make it happen was a giddy little moment for me. To see this idea linked by him meant it was indeed going to go viral to some degree. 854 people saw it (at post time) and saw fit to either like it, comment on it, and best of all, repost it.

Then Steve let me know about this:

His Google+ post made it to the What’s Hot section of the site! Even better. 1339 people have shared it on there!

It was linked elsewhere and made some traction in those places too, it was amazing to see our little message go so far so quickly. Relinks of relinks, jumping from one social network to another, it was awesome to see it take on a life of it’s own. Let alone  the fact that I had a hand in creating it.

It reaffirmed the power of good design for me. In this age it doesn’t take celebrity status to get a message across (but one certainly helped distribute it) or a giant corporation with accompanying budget to get a message out there. Well written text and thoughtful design built on a clever idea can spread a message and hopefully make a better world.

The original image link.