I didn't read much into it yet, but that's ridiculous if GameFAQs were to be taken down. On what grounds? If it's because it shares information about copyrighted works (i.e. video games) that's just ridiculous.
If I see you in person and I tell you about how to pass a video game, should that be censored? Then if I know you but can't see you in person at a particular moment so I text/SMS or email you that information, should that be censored? Then if I want to tell more than one person at once so I post that on a blog, should that be censored? Then if I make a site to present that information in an organized fashion, should that be censored? It's a fine line, sure...but why does it need to be drawn anywhere near here?
Unless you're copying a spoken or textual work, I don't think speech and text by themselves should be censored at all. I don't know if it's maybe because of their particular policies, but I always find it stupid that Wikipedia and other sites can't have song lyrics, for instance. I can understand why they wouldn't have an MP3 of the song I'm inquiring about, but I just want to know the words. It's a waste of time to expect everyone in the world to listen to a song over and over writing down the lyrics for themselves if one person already has and can make that available.
And in VGMaps.com's case, we're not giving you the whole game, we're just showing you maps. Admittedly using the actual graphics can be a grey area, but if we negatived the image, or if the palette colours were slightly off, then they wouldn't be "actual graphics" and you'd still be getting the information you need, and it's still not the experience of playing the actual game so it wouldn't detract from the original work. It's not like we're providing the ROMs or ISOs and explicitly explaining how to use them.
Obviously there are real concerns about copyright infringement and the Internet, but there must be some other way than totally censoring everything that merely mentions music/movies/video games/books/etc. Why not spend the effort shutting down the obvious torrent sites first, at least? If they've already had trouble doing that, what makes them think they can tear down Little Timmy's page of Super Mario fan stuff (hypothetical example)?
(Also...my site is run from here in Canada but actually hosted in Texas in the United States...how does this law apply? Admittedly I should read more about this proposed law but from the little I understand of it, this is my knee-jerk reaction and first impression of it.)
