The Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA, is a bill that grants power to the federal government and copyright holders to take actions against sites that promote copyright infringement. The problem with the bill is its murky definition of what makes a site in violation. A site is in violation of the act if it  operates with the “object of promoting, or has promoted, its use to carry out acts that constitute a violation” of copyright. Unfortunately, this includes any site that allows users to post text, images, audio or videos. There is no additional process for determining if a site actually infringes on this criteria.

At Behance, we take copyright very seriously. As an online platform for Creative Professionals, one of our goals is to help you get the exposure you deserve while at the same time protecting your work with copyright settings. Currently, we allow an assortment of copyright options via Creative Commons licensing, which is what most major photo-sharing sites use. We believe this affords a great balance of protecting your work and allowing it to get the exposure it deserves.

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While flying to Austin for sxsw, I had a small programming task. Take a string of a few search terms, break it apart and highlight those terms in another string. It’s a straightforward task, and probably a wheel that’s been reinvented thousands of time in the history of computer science. I approached it as an exercise, to see if I could add another squeaky wheel to the pile. My goal was to do it without using any 3rd party code or any resources. I had no access to documentation, google, stack overflow, or any of the other resources I use constantly to get my job done every day.

The code that I produced was bloated, naive, and horribly inefficient (I suspect). While writing it, i knew I wasn’t really on the right path. When I got back to New York, I took a look at it, and more or less decided I had wasted my time. Then I realized I had written it on a plane, and had nothing better to do. I simply got myself into the zone, and wanted to work through a problem until it was solved. After I got over my initial disgust, I wondered what aside from boredom and stubbornness had prompted me to complete the task. Read more →