MegaUpload taken down. Have revamped my website but now not sure why.

Seriously, this fight against piracy is a lot worse than the piracy itself. I used MegaUpload a lot in order to send perfectly legal high resolution book cover art which I made with legally bought stock photos over to publishers so they could put them on their books. The high resolution files were simply too big to send in an email.

How am I going to get my cover art to its legal purchaser if people keep taking down file sharing sites just because some bozos are using them illegally?

I thought I’d pass this along:

Originally posted by dmatkins at Why SOPA is dangerous, an explanation of the bill

Originally posted by nyxmidnight at Why SOPA is dangerous, an explanation of the bill

Why SOPA is dangerous

To Sum Up
SOPA:

• Gives the government the right to unilaterally censor foreign websites.
• Gives copyright holders the right to issue economic takedowns and bring lawsuits against website owners and operators, if those websites have features that make it possible to post infringing content. [A comment feature is enough.]
• Makes it a felony offense to post a copyrighted song or video.

This bill turns us all into criminals. If it passes, then you either stop using the Internet, or you simply hope that you never end up in the crosshairs, because if you’re targeted, you will be destroyed by this bill. You don’t have to be a big, mean, nasty criminal — common Internet usage is effectively criminalized under this law. This bill will kill American innovation and development of the Internet, as it will become too risky to do anything of value. It is toxic and dangerous, and should not, under any circumstances, be supported.

And to reiterate that this does affect those of us who are not American if

(a) we want people in the USA to be able to see our sites,

(b) we want to be able to continue to use American sites like YouTube, Fanfiction.net, LJ, wikipedia (too late for poor old MegaUpload, alas) etc,

(c) we don’t want our American friends to be living in a country where they can no longer take free speech for granted and

(d) we don’t want America to become a huge black hole in the middle of the internet, with who knows what kind of gravitational consequences.

On a more personal note, I only just finished revamping my site after taking advice from Jessewave’s readers on my post about authors who write in more than one genre. Everyone seemed to be unanimous that they didn’t mind an author writing in several genres as long as there was no likelihood of them picking up one kind of book in mistake for another. So I’ve re-vamped my website to sort my books out by genre. Take a look now while you still can, I guess!

My newly revamped site.

And now I think I’m off to write some fanfiction while there’s still a chance of being able to find readers for that.