Update: Josh Davis has a great take on this issue that only came to my attention after I wrote this.

Image sharing site Pinterest, with its kind-of-crazy, wild west copyright policy, is a great example of how, for some startups, it's best to shoot first and ask questions later. Under the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Pinterest isn't really responsible for all the copyright-violating content that users post to Pinterest. The site has a system for flagging content that does, which puts Pinterest in compliance with the law and, at least in theory, on the side of rights holders.

But why, for example, has Pinterest failed to implement a straightforward system for recording the rights status of images its users post, as Flickr has? The answer is simple: By resolving the rights on an image after the fact, Pinterest creates a frictionless mechanism for sharing. Which is precisely why the site has taken off. 

Spend a few minutes using Pinterest, and in particular its bookmarklet, and you'll recognize the work of some seriously talented UX designers. The sort who understand that what you leave out is just as important as what you put in. Funny thing is, Pinterest's dodge on copyright is a part of that excellent UX.

A lot of what goes on Pinterest that's a violation of copyright is probably OK in the eyes of many whose images are being appropriated. After all, because Pinterest includes a link back to the source of a piece of content, it's already fifth in driving referral traffic to websites, and it's even better at driving traffic to retailers. That traffic is a sort of in-kind payment to most sites for the use of their images, and it's inarguable that Pinterest is a new use of that content that publishers probably couldn't capture on their own. Whereas assigning rights to images wouldn't just impede sharing on Pinterest -- it might cause it to implode. The Internet masses aren't suddenly going to become experts on fair use.

So while Pinterest is admitting on its own blog that it has a problem with copyright, the most likely outcome of this saga is not a Grooveshark-like end to Pinterest, but an admission by many publishers that they simply don't care what anyone does with their images, as long as it helps drive users back to their sites.

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A friend sends me a link to a 60 Minutes segment she feels it's important I watch. I'm on an iPad—not that it matters, because it's just as much a PC as  the overgrown microcomputers that go by that name—and clicking on the link lands me here:

Why, God? Why?

And that is it. That is literally the end of my interaction with this site, because my only option is to download the iPad app. There is no alternative—no way to click through to the video or text that I was after. And you know what? I'm not going to download your stupid app. Because I am not at home on my own wifi, and that would be an anti-social use of public bandwidth, not to mention the fact that this connection isn't so great, so it would probably take, for all I know, half an hour.

More importantly: Why do so many Web developers think that tablets are an excuse to break the functionality of the Web? Anyone who does this, even if it's just an interstitial ad for a tablet app, should be forced to put the following disclaimer at the top of their tablet-detecting sites:

ATTENTION USER: We know you were enjoying the frictionless access to content that is the implicit promise of a hyperlink, but we would rather you bounce off the outer berm of our walled garden, because ad rates are higher on our tablet apps or something? All we know is, somebody on the 13th floor needs to show steady growth in "engagement" on "post-PC" devices.

It feels like vandalism. This is what hackers do. So why are companies defacing their own sites? Is it really so hard to understand that the browser on a tablet device is in all important respects the equal of the browser on a laptop, and, depending on the machine, in many cases superior?

I know it's petty to rant about this sort of thing when the larger story—the death of the open Web—is the greater threat to the free exchange of information. But this particular manifestation of it—cravenly commercial and stubbornly immune to the most basic tenets of usability—is in some respects one of its most visible expressions.

"Stop the Wall," featuring Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, explains what PIPA is and how to stop it

To paraphrase our last president, Hollywood hates your freedom. There, I said it. Hollywood is the Al Qaeda of content. It clings to an antediluvian notion of how media should be created and distributed. The SOPA and PIPA acts -- which Congress is continuing to consider, despite today's mass protest against them -- are its paternalistic, anti-Enlightenment attempt to suicide bomb the Internet's ability to disrupt its pre-modern, rapidly deteriorating business model.

[Please, take a moment to read Reddit's quick FAQ on SOPA / PIPA. Then consider calling your representative via this form and/or signing the petition.]

Maybe that sounds like crazy talk. But think about it: Hollywood would use SOPA to make it possible for anyone to single-handedly take down any site on the Internet, without the action of a court, just because anyone with access to that site (say, a commenter) used it to link to copyrighted content. What does Hollywood think? That if they win this level of power, the Internet will stop happening in the rest of the world?

That's why today two of the smartest, most successful guys in America -- Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, blacked out the logo on the most iconic homepage on the Internet. But don't take their word for it -- dozens of other sites have followed suit.

If either SOPA or PIPA pass, it will be an AK-47 round through the chest of America's capacity to stay ahead in practically the only industry we have left in which we have the slightest lead -- the Internet, the web, information technology. If you're cool with Hollywood blowing up the websites that are protesting SOPA/PIPA by blacking themselves out today -- along with every other site on the web, more or less -- then by all means, do nothing. Hollywood would like nothing better than for all of us to assent to its attempts to roll back the clock to physical media that can be locked down with custom hardware.

Hollywood has spent $95 million lobbying for this kind of legislation, according to the founder of Reddit, whose excellent primer on the subject, above, you should watch.

All that lobbying muscle means that the battle over Internet censorship, waged under the banner of ending piracy, isn't going to go away. The Internet is a copying machine, and making money on it means making it easier to get your content legitimately rather than through piracy. I've got nothing against attempts to make piracy more difficult -- content makers should be able to dictate the terms under which their efforts are used, as has always been the case under copyright law -- but only as long as those strictures don't harm the free exchange of information in every other form on the Internet.

Hollywood still has an awful lot of our money, and the ignorance of our Congress, as demonstrated in the video above, is vast. SOPA and PIPA, in other words, are the Internet's version of the war on terror or the war on drugs. A new reality, a Forever War, which we'll all be fighting for the rest of our lives -- or at least until the end of the protection racket that modern copyright has become.