You’re probably thinking, wow Presentation School, you’re a day late!   We disagree, these bills will not be debated until February so this issue is still alive and well.

If you can, you really truly should use legal images and videos in your presentations when you can (more on why here:  Why Legal Images are Good).  We all want artists to get paid for their work, correct?  However, we all realize that sometimes it’s just appropriate and unavoidable to yank a non-legal image for our presentations.

However, the way that these bills are worded makes it so any of those presentations that you post online with an illegal image could land you in jail for 5 years.  It’s not clear if this could extend into in-person presentations, but it sure is worded in such a way that could make it risky to use such images.

If you have not already contacted your state Senators or Congresspeople, please do so.  Especially those of you in New York, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand are currently supporting PIPA and mance NY State Congresspeople are supporting SOPA.  Just changing your images on Facebook or talking about it on social media won’t help.  Politicians only listen to their constituents and they can only do that if you contact them directly.

Check out the Wikipedia lookup list for help:

We agree that artists and corporate entities should have the right to protect and profit form their branding and work.  We just don’t like how these bills are currently written.