1. The Academy has issued new provisions for future documentary Oscar nominations, including eliminating committee determination of nominations and adding a rule that a doc has to have been reviewed by the New York Times or LA Times to qualify (intended to prevent TV docs – *side eye at HBO* – from horning in on a film award). The latter has drummed up controversy, but Michael Moore insists it’s all good. Unrelated to this controversy but related to the Academy, the organization’s chief executive Dawn Hudson is under major fire.

2. IndieWire highlights 2011’s studio box office trends, as well as what happened at the specialty box office, which was apparently so much that it required a second part. Midnight in Paris led specialty grosses, while it was a down year overall for animation. British Prime Minister David Cameron wants UK filmmakers to shoot for topping one of these box office revenue lists in 2012. And the number of studios backing films that will make such lists is reduced by one, as Lions Gate has acquired Summit, thus putting The Hunger Games and Twilight series under the same banner.

3. Warner Bros. is getting tough about its DVD rental window delay, and while Netflix has caved, Redbox and Blockbuster are poised to fight. Unfortunately, Blockbuster is also poised to die. While Netflix is cooperating with Warner Bros. on DVDs, it is pulling out of the Warners-backed UltraViolet, which has yet to take off, though now Amazon and Samsung are trying to help out.

4. Publishers Weekly highlights 2011’s print bestseller trends, and USA Today says fiction sales were the big story last year, while a post-holiday e-books sales surge is the story now. It sounds like the Nook isn’t benefiting as much as it could from that, while the Kindle Fire could end up stomping other e-reader devices in the end, including the regular Kindle, not to mention other tablets.

5. Music stocks were mixed in 2011, vinyl album sales soared, rock sales were up, and digital sales surpassed physical sales for the first time, but indie labels got just a 12% cut of overall music sales. Most strikingly, only about 2% of the total album releases were responsible for 90% of new album revenue in 2011.

6. You might be tired of reading here about how video game sales in the US are slipping, so I’ll change it up for you: video game sales in the UK are slipping. The Consumer Electronics Show presented some hope for revitalizing the gaming industry, from Nintendo’s Wii U to Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows.

7. Twitter failed to predict the Iowa caucus winner but nailed it in New Hampshire, and the main takeaway is that Ron Paul could totally be the president of Twitter if he wanted. Twitter did pretty good at predicting a health epidemic, but it apparently falls short on fighting against pedophiles.

8. Twitter got mad at Google for incorporating Google+ into search data because it might diminish Twitter’s influence, and Google was all, This is your own fault, jerks. Facebook got snooty about it more quietly. Some think this is a big mistake by Google; others see it as pushing Google ahead in the online identity race. Google+ is growing, but I don’t think it’ll get to 1 billion users by August like Facebook.

9. Around the world in three sentences: Belarusians can no longer access foreign websites and India is threatening China-style controls, whereas in Sweden file-sharing has been recognized as a religion. Text messaging is declining in some countries, and globally, a mere 1% of bandwidth users are consuming half of all the traffic. Apple supplier factories in the Far East are rife with labor violations, as a This American Life segment recently exposed.

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past two weeks: All the TCA posts, Great Television Women, New TVs, iPad Value for Cable, Court Leaning Toward Indecency Regs, 2 Broke Girls at TCA, More Content to Xbox, Netflix’s UK Launch, Moffat & Sexism, Defending Pop Culture Studies, Louis CK’s Lesson, HBO Ends Netflix Discount, Consumer Usage Report, Reality TV Class, Comcast-Disney Deal, Netflix Doubles Up Hulu, Netflix Originals Plan, Viewing Stats, Internet Changing Syndication.

So what’s the big deal? What makes this bill so much worse than all of Congress’s other “anti-piracy” measures? Well, it would put in place an entire system of internet censorship that would empower the US government and corporations to block any website. The Department of Justice would have a blacklist of foreign “rogue sites” which fit a vague definition of enabling intellectual property infringement and would block American users from accessing these sites, in addition to cutting off the sites’ revenues from US-based advertising services and payment processors. All of this would happen within five days of the accusation of infringement, without any judge, any two-sided hearing, or any due process for the accused site. In fact, it further encourages pre-emptive “voluntary action” by offering immunity for internet service providers, browser producers, and search engines that block sites without even any infringement claims.

SOPA’s corporate backers in the recording and film industries focus on overseas sites that they refer to as “dedicated to intellectual property theft,” despite the fact that, for instance, targeted one-click file-hosting services like Rapidshare have been found legal in both American and European courts. In addition to plowing over such “rogue sites” that actually have substantial non-infringing uses, SOPA would also ensnare domestic sites that link to any infringing material or any “rogue site”— and would block the entire domain for even one link on one page. This means that any social media platform that hosts user-generated content— everything from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to Reddit, Tumblr, and Wikipedia— would become liable for everything their users post. SOPA, then, would overturn over a decade of precedent for internet law in the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protect internet intermediaries from liability for what users do (an example of how prior copyright expansion legislation at least included some reasonable limitations).

SOPA would have a huge impact on freedom of expression, creativity, and innovation online. Doing away with safe harbor protections would place a massive burden on online services to police their users and more actively censor what they do online. This would have chilling effects on the free expression and creativity of users by encouraging self-censorship and would stifle innovative new start-ups with limited resources. Further, if whole platforms disappear from US access, the free expression of all other users becomes collateral damage. Of course, these very powerful tools for shutting down online activities hold great potential for abuse— especially when held by industries with a long history of using the law to expand their control and protect them from disruptive innovators.

Further, SOPA flies in the face of the principles of net neutrality and internet freedom that the US government evangelizes everywhere else around the world. While the US extols the virtues of free and open internet connectivity globally, SOPA would institute the same technical censorship system as China, Iran, Syria, and similarly repressive regimes. The only difference is that the American censorship system would instead be used to protect corporate profits— intellectual property now trumps all other rights. In addition to undermining American credibility in calling out authoritarian states’ internet censorship, SOPA would also set a precedent for other liberal democracies to further filter and block internet content. On top of all this, SOPA involves mucking around with the fundamental technical workings of the internet, with serious consequences for the stability and security of critical internet resources like the Domain Name System. By interfering with the connections between site addresses and the servers they are designed to connect to, SOPA’s blocking system would undermine the next-generation DNSSEC system being developed by the US government’s own internet security experts and all other internet protocols that depend on it working universally consistent.

SOPA is now in markup in the House Judiciary Committee, where the hearings have been laughably lopsided and the representatives have openly admitted their ignorance of the constitutional, economic, and technical implications of what they’re proposing. The bill’s sponsors were rushing for a vote before the holidays, but, after some last-minute jerking around with on-again-off-again sessions this week, it has now been delayed until some time in the new year. (PIPA has already made it out of committee and will be coming to the Senate floor in the new year.) This is a positive development: they weren’t able to ram it through committee around the holidays while fewer people are paying attention. However, SOPA’s supporters are surely counting on the large opposition effort losing momentum. If you find any of the above scary— if you don’t want to see your Facebook feed blacked out for real soon— you should help keep the pressure on Congress to stand up for freedom online.