Ugh. Sick of the acronyms yet? Only the military could come up with more contrived combinations of letters. And they have: ARGONAUT, or Applied Research reGarding Operationally Novel And Unique Technologies. (And that’s just one example…)

SOPA and PIPA are supposed to protect something of great value to companies and writers, too: intellectual property. These acts would do that by giving the Justice Department new powers to protect your intellectual property, including getting court orders that would bar online advertisers from doing business with websites that trade in illegally obtained copyrighted material, and even putting people in jail for distributing copyrighted material. That means if you write something and copyright it (you don’t even have to file the copyright—just say it’s copyrighted and it is) and post in on your website, and someone steals it and distributes it, the feds could be all over the case. The same goes for a company’s intellectual material.

This has been coming for quite some time, really. Back in the internet’s Wild West phase in the late 1990s, copyrights were largely ignored. Programs like Napster allowed people to share bad copies of songs if they were willing to wait up to an hour for them to download. You see, in those days, nearly everyone was connecting to the internet with a dial-up modem over a phone line. If the government had created an acronym for this technology, it would be SLOW, or TURTLE. Sure, a lot of pirating of copyrighted material took place, and that’s one of the reasons that Napster was shut down. But we hadn’t seen anything yet.

Fast forward to 2012. Broadband internet is everywhere, even in rural China, where US copyright law isn’t in the vocabulary. Thanks to broadband internet, file-sharing programs like BitTorrent, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide who like to share, one can download an entire two-and-a-half-hour movie in HD in literally just a few minutes. Compared to the Clinton era, the sharing of copyrighted material today is like comparing a Ferrari to a Model T Ford.

Critics of the proposed laws say they overreach and give the federal government the power to violate the first amendment and censor the internet. In fact, by the time you read this, WikiPedia and potentially dozens of other sites will have already staged day-long blackouts of their sites in protest.

What does this mean for your business? It means you need to educate yourself and make up your own mind. A good overview can be found on CNET. I won’t tell you how to think or what to decide. But this is big, and you owe it to yourself to learn the facts and then voice your opinion to your Congressmen and Senators.

1. E-book sales will equal print book sales by the end of the year. While e-books have made steady inroads into the total sales of book, they aren’t at 50 percent just yet. However, it looks like e-books are making up about 20 percent of total book sales, which is phenomenal, considering that in 2008, they made up just over one percent of sales. And in some niche categories, e-books are outselling print.
2. Two dozen more major market newspapers will end their print editions. While some newspapers have completely gone out of business and others have dropped certain days from publication, the real trend seems to be a shift toward a “web-first” model, in which the online version of the newspaper is the primary product for consumers, and the print version is the “afterthought,” instead of the other way around. It’s causing massive reorganization of newsrooms and paradigm shifts in corporate cultures. It’s even messing up employees’ holidays, as companies realize that consumers still want a full day’s worth of news of traditionally “light” days like Christmas when much of the news staff is off.
3. The Internet and TV will become one. This has darn near happened. Most every new TV is being sold with full internet connectivity, and more and more people have dropped cable TV for Hulu, Netflix and other services.
4. Self-publishing will exceed the traditional publishing house route. Self-publishing is indeed growing, and self-published books make up as much as 14 percent of the market for adult fiction, according to the Association of American Publishers.
5. Reading will surpass television watching as the national pastime. Sorry, bibliophiles, but TV (or video in some form) is still king. A June 2011 Nielsen reports said that Americans are watching 22 more minutes of TV a month. Oh, well. One can dream…

Not too bad, given the ups and downs of 2011. Happy 2012!

1. E-book sales will equal print book sales by the end of the year. That’s right—50 percent of the market in the next 12 months, not some wimpy seven or nine percent. And why not? Digital technologies are exploding. No one had even heard of Twitter four years ago. Things happen fast.
2. Two dozen more major market newspapers will end their print editions. It happened in Seattle, it more or less happened in Detroit, and it’s coming to a major metro daily near you. Why go to Blockbuster when there’s Netflix? Print is yesterday’s news. I give print magazines a pass for now—they have shelf life, but look for more and more publications to go exclusively online.
3. The Internet and TV will become one. This whole notion that television is one medium and the Internet is another is very 20th century. Most new HDTVs are Internet-ready, and you can choose to get your kicks from cable or from Hulu or YouTube. It’s all data in a wire hooked to a screen.
4. Self-publishing will exceed the traditional publishing house route. More and more authors are going the do-it-yourself route, and the Internet makes it easier than ever to get your book out there. The catch: it may be easier than ever to publish a book, but it will remain hard to write a good one.
5. Reading will surpass television watching as the national pastime. A million librarians around the world just felt a tingle run down their spines. But why not? It’s easier than ever to read—on your phone, your computer tablet, your desktop, your e-reader. And it’s downloadable. You don’t even have to get off the couch. And with your HDTV connected to the Internet, you can read in 60” 1080p. That’s just decadent.

Crazy? Ridiculous? Maybe. Check in with me this time next year—if you haven’t forgotten.

on how the Internet is siphoning away readers and advertising dollars from newspapers and magazines. In these commentaries, the Internet is seen as a competitor or replacement for print media—an aggressor that is stealing jobs, putting writers on the street, and sinking levels of journalistic accountability to lows not seen since the days of yellow journalism a century ago.

However, these comparisons are spurious. The Internet is not a competitor or replacement, but rather a medium that is new and revolutionary (even though it’s been a mainstream tool for 15 years or more, its very nature is to continually reinvent itself so as always to appear new). Like other revolutionary technologies before it, it is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and play. It is creating desires, lifestyles, markets and habits that we could not have conceived of until they came about. In the 1960s, the world of tomorrow featured flying cars and robot housekeepers. No one ever predicted that the future would include an interactive world-wide computer network through which we exchange ideas, images, sounds and information. Like a clever Madison Ave. advertising firm, the Internet has us saying “I never knew I wanted this. What did I do before I had the Internet?”

The purpose of magazines and newspapers has never been to put ink on paper. The purpose has always been to convey information, whether that information was entertainment, news or visual information in the form of photography and images. The printed page was simply the best format available. We should use the Internet to achieve that same goal, and it’s a medium ideally suited to that task. But it can’t be achieved by forcing the printed page onto the computer screen, or by cutting and pasting print media’s business models.

However, this is exactly what we have tended to do with each generation of new media. For example, the first television commercials sounded just like the radio commercials of the day, with perhaps a still image of dish soap as the announcer droned on—a far cry from today’s clever and innovative visual displays. It was only when we realized that television was a unique, new medium that we began to utilize it at its maximum potential.

Print media professionals—or should we say information professionals—should stop trying to force their paradigm onto a fundamentally different media, just because both print and online channels share some common building blocks like “words” or “pictures.” They should instead embrace the Internet for what it is—dynamic, vibrant, rapidly changing and unique—and definitely not print. Nevertheless, there will always be an important role for print media, and always a large segment of the population that utilizes it.