As of this morning, SOPA and its evil twin, PIPA, are effectively dead. A tsunami of public outrage pushed a major realignment in Congress. Plans for votes were canceled.

But these bills are not truly dead. Like zombies, they'll be back, propelled by the rage of content owners.

I don't share the rage, but I understand it. In the nearly 18 years I've been working in digital media, I've had to deal with a number of cases of outright thievery -- stolen images and artwork, copied stories, hijacked data, trademark violations. Once I discovered that some geek working for Lexis-Nexis was reposting to Usenet every newspaper story that mentioned the Grateful Dead. It happens.

And I understand the resentment of Google, which has become insanely wealthy by fixing a problem (how to find things) that content creators weren't smart enough to understand, much less address. Google's rise contributed to a glut of ad inventory that has hammered down ad prices, exacerbating the troubles of old-line media companies struggling to figure out the disruptive forces of the Internet.

But I don't share it. Google created value, and is not responsible for the plight of (for example) newspapers. And let's keep in mind that jealousy is not a virtue.

"Intellectual property" is not a natural right. It's a limited artificial monopoly enforced by the government for practical purposes, such as described in the Constitution: "the Progress of Science and useful Arts." It's not absolute, and there is such a thing as "fair use" of copyrighted materials, which is why I'm illustrating this post with a screen shot from The Simpsons.

As someone who's worked in the content creation business all my adult life, I think we need copyright laws that are fair, enforceable, and in the public interest. They should not violate free-speech rights. Persons accused of violations should be able to defend their case in court before suffering penalties, not after. Penalties should be in reasonable proportion to substantiated claims of genuine damage. And only actors, not third parties, should be affected.

And such laws should be written by representatives of the people, not by lobbyists.

These things seem obvious. The very existence of SOPA-PIPA demonstrates how corporate money has corrupted Congress. We all deserve better.

So Kodak, the company that invented amateur photography in the 19th century and invented digital photography in the 20th, is on the ropes. There are obvious lessons for newspapers and newsrooms. Here are a few of them.

Your business isn't what you think it is. Kodak at its peak looked like a photography company, but it was really a giant chemical manufacturing company. Digital tech rendered the entire chemical photography business irrelevant. By comparison, newspapers looked like news and information companies, but they were really expensive commercial advertisement printing and delivery systems. If you have borrowed heavily to build and maintain capital-intensive processes that are suddenly rendered irrelevant, you're in deep trouble no matter how smart you are and no matter what you do. Printing isn't yet irrelevant, but it's trending that way. This is not to the time to invest in a new three-around compact press line.

Brands decay. When I started in photography, Kodak was the trusted source. (Sound familiar, newspaper people?) We might flirt with funky European Agfa and exotic Asian Fuji, but when it was time to get serious, it was Kodak Tri-X and Kodak paper and Kodak Dektol. In a digital world, Kodak's brand means little. And if you think your newspaper's brand is a huge asset, you probably need to get out and talk to some young people now and then.

Early to market doesn't mean you win. When some of you kids were still in diapers and I was still in Minneapolis, we set up an early Kodak digital camera (I think it might have been a DC40) on a tripod at the State Fair. People queued up around the building to get their pictures taken and published online. Kodak was an early mover. So were newspapers, which had online products before the Web existed. Look how that turned out.

Disruption doesn't happen just once. On the digital side, Kodak initially pivoted quite well, creating the "Easyshare" concept and reconquering digital photography from the Japanese tech companies. By the middle of the last decade, Kodak was the market leader. But suddenly smartphone cameras have autofocus lenses, 8-megapixel sensors and HDTV video capability. Result: the low-end market is toast, and Kodak isn't taken seriously in the high end, where Canon and Nikon reign. Newspapers have seen a similar thing happen with classified advertising, which in the late 1990s was an online cash cow. Real estate agents and car dealers now run their own publishing operations.

All of this may seem like a downer, but it doesn't need to be. If you clear out the assumptions, what's left may be easier to understand. Businesses still need convey offers to consumers, and if anything, digital technology has chopped the audience up in to little pieces and distributed it all over the universe. Pulling audiences back together creates value. Make that your goal, and don't let up for a second.

Here's a New Year's resolution I'd like to see made, and kept, by all tech journalists:

Report first, then think, then write. Don't skip the first two steps, and don't get them out of order.

Computer, networking and mobile technology is changing all of human society. Journalism about tech is important. But tech journalism today is a vast wasteland of plagiarism, rumormongering, empty snark, fanboiism, trolling, unfounded assumptions and whole-cloth invention.

It's damned hard to find any actual reporting. Actual facts, when they are to be found, usually from PR handouts and spec sheets. That's not journalism. It's churnalism.

These failures are not unique to tech journalism, of course. Mainstream journalism, especially cable TV news, falls into the same traps. But you should have learned by third grade that "everybody else does it" is no excuse.

There's a small, private get-together under way in Phoenix this weekend called #NewsFoo that is catching some flak on Twitter as being exclusionary and elitist. Same thing happened last year, and I think also the year before. It's not public. It's not transparent. It didn't advertise and accept applications.

I don't attend a lot of big cattle-call conferences any more unless I'm asked speak or be on a panel and the conference will cover my expenses. I don't get much out of them. Neither I nor my employer has cash to spare.

But I do get something out of small, intense get-togethers. Three in particular stand out:

• A private, invitation-only conference that Chris Feola pulled together at the American Press Institute in Reston several years ago. There I met some fascinating people, including Dan Bricklin, who invented the computer spreadsheet, and Brad Cox, who created Objective-C. One of the unexpected outcomes was a news XML standards project whose efforts eventually were merged into NITF.
• A private, invitation-only conference at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg marking 10 years of Web news. The outcomes of that meeting included the community-blogging initiatives at Morris, including the Bluffton Today project, as well as important "social contract" language, developed in a breakout session with Dan Gillmor, that we've used ever since.
• A private, invitation-only conference that Norbert Specker organized in Zurich in 2002 where I learned a great deal about organizational issues that's been helpful in the years since, and met a researcher in "cybernetic psychology" whose work led me to develop a software tool that we used internally for several years.

I was invited to NewsFoo this year and last year. I wasn't able to attend. Perhaps that colors my perception. Naturally I don't feel excluded.

But I'm sure there are many other very interesting get-togethers to which I'm not invited. We can't all be everywhere.

NewsFoo is an "unconference," a technique developed in the world of software development. An unconference is a gamble and the outcome will turn on the talents and interests and energies of those who attend.

This can be done through a process of self-selection and even within the framework of a big conference; BOF ("birds of a feather") sessions are common at software conferences. But even in the open-source software world there are many examples of closed processes and many private conversations.

I were spending my money, or my foundation's money, or my company's money, I'd want to raise the odds of success by trying to attract a combination of people that I thought would interact well. I don't think that is properly characterized if it's described as an attempt to create a "news elite."

It may be difficult to point to concrete examples of results from conferences of any stripe, but that doesn't mean there are no results. Every attendee has the potential to change the world. An idea might take years to bear fruit. Relationships developed at such meetings might lead to something years down the road. Any number of day-to-day decisions could be altered.

Whether the investment of time was worthwhile is a judgment the participants will have to make; whether the investment of money was worthwhile is a judgment the sponsors will have to make. I'm sure they will.