Hysterical over SOPA for all the wrong reasons
The House's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Senate's companion Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), were shelved last week in the wake of protests by dozens of websites and large numbers of their users, as well as a virtually unanimous chorus of criticism from leading progressive voices and outlets, including Michael Moore, Cenk Uygur, Keith Olbermann, Alternet, Daily Kos, MoveOn and many people associated with Occupy Wall Street. Judging by the fervor of the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests, a casual observer might think the advocates of the anti-piracy bills were in the same moral league as the torturers at Abu Ghraib.
To be sure, the legislators who crafted the ill-fated bills and the film industry lobbyists who supported them have little to be proud of. As someone who makes my living in the music business representing artists who are hurt by piracy, I was frustrated by the failure of the bills’ proponents to explain their rationale in language I could understand. This may have been because the bills themselves were so flawed, but it also reflects the delusion that this issue could be settled in the corridors of Washington without public debate. (This presumption was exemplified by the statements of MPAA Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd, who petulantly threatened that the Obama administration’s defection to the anti-SOPA/PIPA camp would imperil Hollywood contributions to Democrats.)
But before we celebrate this “populist” victory, it’s worth remembering that the defeat of SOPA and PIPA was also a victory for the enormously powerful tech industry, which almost always beats the far smaller creative businesses in legislative disputes. (Google alone generated more than $37 billion in 2011, more than double the revenue of all record companies, major and indie combined.)
It is also worth contemplating the moral compass of Megaupload.com’s Kim Dotcom, who was arrested in New Zealand last week in his 25,000-square-foot compound surrounded by a fleet of Mercedes and Ferraris, all allegedly made possible by selling content stolen from artists (and yes, entertainment companies) around the world. As film producer (Mean Streets, The Last Waltz and author Jon Taplin wrote on his blog, putting the accused pirate’s riches in perspective, “A bunch of the musicians I worked with in the 1960’s and 1970’s, who made wonderful records that are still on iPod have seen their royalties cut by 80 percent.”
One example of anti-SOPA rhetorical over-reach was a tendency by some to invent sinister motives for the sponsors. On his usually brilliant show The Young Turks, Uygur said that SOPA’s sponsors were “pushing for a monopoly for the MPAA and to kill their competition on the Internet.” This is untrue. They wanted to kill those entities that steal their movies and make money off them, either directly or indirectly. There really is a difference.
In a widely viewed anti-SOPA/PIPA speech on Ted.com, Internet philosopher Clay Shirky similarly attributed dark motives to the studios. The targets are not Google and Yahoo, he said, “They’re us, we’re the people getting policed.” This is accurate only if by “us” he means the people who illegally watched Hugo from the likes of Megaupload. If he means a friend sharing Marianne Faithfull’s version of &ldqup;Visions of Johanna&rdqup; with me on Facebook, then the accusation is absurd.
Shirky’s remarks begin with a poignant anecdote about a bakery that stopped allowing children to put up their own drawings of characters like Mickey Mouse because of fear of copyright lawsuits. Examples such as this, or of a theoretical risk of parents being charged for the right to have kids sing “Happy Birthday”, are demagogic. The underlying issue is scale. There is a profound moral difference between loaning a friend a book and posting, without permission, the content of bestsellers for commercial gain—and people and legislators ought to take that distinction into account.
SOPA and PIPA bashers were also a little loose with the word “censorship”. To me, that word should be reserved for government power that restricts ideas—like the US government locking up Eugene Debs for opposing World War I, or prosecuting City Lights Books for selling Howl. This kind of repression is common now in China, where most computers and cell phones are made by oppressed labor. Real censorship is dreadful enough that there ought to be a different word for laws that would try to prevent websites from illegally posting the latest Mission Impossible movies or making ancillary income from the eyeballs such transactions attract.
One of Shirky’s acolytes wrote on the comments page, “We're talking about *digital* content here. When I copy digital information, no one loses anything. The creator of the content doesn't lose profit, because I haven't taken anything physical from them. It does not cost anything to copy digital information. It isn't stealing to copy a digital something.” Umm…what about the cost of creating the content worth copying?
As Robert Levine describes in his book Free Ride, down this road lies a barren culture with lots of dancing kittens on YouTube but no infrastructure that can nurture future artists. Piracy enablers stress the need to maintain incentives for investment in tech companies. But maybe business models that depend on using copyrighted material for free should not attract investment in the first place. iTunes pays artists, record companies and songwriters and is doing just fine. Meanwhile, the degradation of the value of intellectual property elsewhere online has caused a dramatic reduction of investment in businesses that fund the creation of journalism, literature, music and films.
For years, there have been Internet philosophers who claimed that advertising revenue would replace copyright revenue and those of us in the “old media” simply needed to get up to date. It’s simply not true.
Some argue that, since iTunes and Amazon and are surviving, Napster’s original model was legally killed and Kim Dotcom was apprehended, no new laws are needed. The status quo may be what we end up with, but that doesn’t make it inevitable or right. Human beings have created the piracy problem and although, like any kind of crime, society can’t eliminate it entirely, we can decide whether or not to seriously try.
In a way, this is a fight between Godzilla and King Kong. Consumers may like Godzilla because they don’t want any interruption in the full use of their gadgets. And I prefer King Kong because I’ve never seen an Internet company give advances to writers, musicians or filmmakers that allow them to concentrate on creativity. But let’s be real—we should look at all of these companies with a jaundiced eye and question their talking points at least as rigorously as we scrutinize politicians. What is good for Google and Facebook is not always going to be what’s best for the 99 percent. (And of course Microsoft and Apple et al. are extremely aggressive when it comes to protecting their intellectual property rights).
I hope that in future weeks, some of the anti-SOPA/PIPA progressives will reflect on the content of some of the Kool-Aid that has recently been served and help swing the pendulum back, if only a little, in a direction in which intellectual property can be nourished. Otherwise, we will be complicit in accelerating the trend of the last decade, in which those who write code get richly rewarded, while those who write the music, poetry, drama and journalism that are being encoded have to get day jobs.
Bio: Danny Goldberg is the President of Gold Village Entertainment and author of the books "Bumping Into Geniuses" and "How The Left Lost Teen Spirit." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
Keep in mind that piracy stomps on artists much in THE SAME WAY that SOPA/PIPA stomps on the techies that make your website work, that make sure people can view your website, that bring your website back up after something fails or gets corrupted.
If you stopped for 10 seconds and read what the astronomically vast amount of complaints and opposition about SOPA/PIPA are, you would see that a very close to 100% of people acknoledge that piracy is an issue and that the ARTISTS should be compensated for their work.
When you have media content middle men that are pushing draconian regime onto people because their multi billion dollar revinues (which you KNOW they are pulling a lot of profit off of) was not as much as they wanted. When you read about these same companies doing things that are bad and 100% getting away with it, time and time and time again... it really shoots a huge gaping hole in your entire position.
Go get educated on what the opposition REALLY is about. Go visit Reddit's SOPA page and just read the comments and articles for a while and try to be unbiased (I understand that working at a news company means you're incapable of being unbiased, but at least give it a shot). I swear to you that if you did it would be a massive eye opener.
If the people supporting SOPA/PIPA could get their facts straight, and stop treating everyone else so poorly, and ACTUALLY stand up for whats right rather than whats in the interest of their profits, and actually listen, and actually report fairly, it would stop ALL of the negativity towards the news companies.
The ball is in your court. Are you going to join humanity and actually look around and start seeing people rather than dollar signs that push ratings?
Of course, I'm just some stupid pirate scum bag whos entire future revolves around making sure I can keep peoples networks and internet running despite the media companies best efforts to push a bill that from a technical stand point does not work. Just like my stupid scum bag step brother artist who doesn't want to be told what he can and cannot draw. We're just stupid nobodies, just like the rest of us stupid scum bag millions of people who value freedom and values.
10 million of us stood up together at one time on Jan. 18 because the media companies REFUSED to listen and continued to insult and slander us and our oppinions and very real concerns. We made it very loud and clear when we said "We do not want to be censored and (get ready for this one) we want to find an alternative method to punish the pirates without punishing everyone." The people that consume the media content are the ones that are getting pissed off by the media's continued inability to treat us like human beings.
You are chosing to fall into rank of the bought out pawns of the media companies that continue to treat people like they are not people. Are you sure you want to take that side? After all, it's these same stupid ignorant "pirates" that consume the content that you make, and their continued consumption of your content is what gives you a job.
Heres a little reading for you to do. If you have any value of journalism, you WILL read them because you will want to know both sides of the story. If you don't read them, it's pretty clear that you don't value journalism but do favor spouting what the suits with check books tell you to spout. For what it's worth, this article is such a barf of one sided uninformed rhetoric that it removes any value it would have had otherwise. I'm truely disappointed to see that this is the level CBS stoops too, but absolutely no surprised.
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/universal-music-group-took-down-after-the-smokes-music
http://gizmodo.com/5869321/dear-recording-industry-pay-9-million-for-pirating-tv-shows-or-shut-up
(that last one should REALLY interest CBS, as the RIAA PIRATED from CBS! Hypocrits. And then they wonder why no one trusts them with unlimited power...)
Just ask the Mom and Pop bar and restaurant owners how "demagogic" that concept is when they are getting sued for putting "Watch the Superbowl here" on their Marquees. The NFL went crazy enforcing their "trademark" so will the MPAA and the RIAA because they will be able to. To think they wouldn't is either naive or just foolish.
Some commenters may feel piracy is justified by entertainment companies' huge markups; I don't. But I'm not prepared to accept a SOPA/PIPA rewrite until and unless it (a) reverses the "guilty until proven innocent" approach that grants an allegedly infringing website no due process, and (b) focuses on the sites that are actually pirating, rather than giving the government and content creators freedom to mess with the DNS system.
Arab springs. Democratic debate by a free people. Exposing the masses in countries like China to the ideas and power of free speech. These are very happy times we live in and the internet is a big part of it. Imagine China evolving into a democratic society without firing a single shot. What would that be worth?
Once people get a taste of Freedom they want more and more of it. Freedom is it's own reward. Even though the internet in China is policed, there is still a lot of content that gets through. They see it. Very powerful stuff. I'd say a case could be made that it is within the interest of our Nation's long term national security to keep the internet 110% free and uncensored. The internet IS a weapon for Freedom. Get it?
Now the internet is wild and free. So few things in life today are. The moment the Govt. begins to dilute it in anyway we have lost something we won't get back. Death by a thousand cuts should not be the internet's future legacy.
So many laws are passed in order to accomplish something specific that at face value appeared to be reasonable, but later were twisted and sometimes perverted into doing something never intended. SOPA and PIPA were exactly as Clay Shirky described them and once the status quo was reset to this standard you can bet that the next round of changes would be more invasive and restrictive.
I contacted my representatives and told them I didn't like SOPA and PIPA. Keep the internet free. I'm glad they listened. You can count on me contacting them again the next time something like this comes along.
Finally, if the recording industries have problems with copyright violations then they need to address the individuals that are wholesale copying their material and bring them to court. If someone infringes on my copyrights of my trademarks for my business that's what I have to do. I don't get Senators and Representatives writing legislation that specifically target creative ways of protecting my investments. I have to charge someone with infringement and have my day in court over it. Why should these industries have to function any differently than I do? This whole SOPA and PIPA thing was very narrow minded and very poorly thought.
We have much greater problems our Govt. needs to deal with than wasting their time on something that's not broken in the first place.
So where do we draw the line? How do we put media out for the public that is not able to be copied? This is a question that has been on the table since Vinyl and i can guarantee it will not go away with a new Govt Bill being passed.
Take a look at the BIG picture instead of your pocketbook and your view just might change.
What these bills would do is give our government the power to censor the internet of content it doesn't like. Under the proposed rules, if a website merely has a LINK to supposed copyright infringing content anywhere on its pages, the WHOLE SITE can be censored... This is not only unreasonable, but downright scary. If for instance, there is a political site the government doesn't like, like say the whistle-blowing site wikileaks, then someone at the government just has to post a link to an illegal mp3 in the comments section, and suddenly the whole site can be taken down. You don't have to be Chinese to know this is bad news.
Now ACTA is being worked out in SECRET, and the leaked rules are much worse than either PIPA or SOPA. Freedom of Information requests on these closed door meetings have been denied on NATIONAL SECURITY grounds, even though many corporations are allowed to give THEIR input. This smacks of conspiracy to circumvent the democratic process. People are right to be angry.
I am sorry, but if it comes down to a battle between the movie/music industries and the First Amendment, don't expect that We The People will side with the former.
Instead, the media industry should come up with new business model (I think megaupload could be of assistance there) or get the hell out of the way.
You're finding the rare extremist and using it as a strawman. You'd get in trouble for doing on that on a community forum, but somehow this got published in CBS. And if you don't see the problems with lack of due process, targeting sites for just "enabling" copying (Youtube), or forcing "search engines" to remove targeted links and defining it so broadly it could mean any social media site, I don't know what to tell you.
Goldberg's insistence that most of those who came out against SOPA/PIPA are out to aid and abet pirates is petulant, spoiled, and narrow-minded. No one wants to legalize theft, Danny, so get a hold of yourself.
These bills -- so lovingly embraced by media moguls who don't care who they step on in order to increase their profits -- were blasted because they were too far-reaching. They would have provided the RIAA a legal basis to prosecute anyone who ever posted a video of their kid humming a tune.
While it may be an absurd thing to be afraid of actually happening, we don't just scrawl out laws for the asking and let the chips fall where they may. The potential for abuse is far too great, and the problem that these bill sought to address is marginal.
The film and music industries have been increasingly profitable year after year. So why the urgency to police the internet? Because you could be even richer? That's gonna be a tough sell, brother.
Try lowering the price point on your product instead. When people can afford to buy your product, they will.
Piracy is not a zero-sum game. It's not as if every song you prevent from being pirated equals another dollar in your pocket. Music and video are not necessities: they are luxuries. There are countless people in an economic state who, if they can't get it for free, just won't get it at all. They'll simply do something else, instead of downloading, listening to, and popularizing your product.
Finally, crybabying about Google's profits being so much larger than the film and music industries is nauseating. Try to maintain some perspective about how important to society your product is. Google provides a service that assists every single aspect of modern life by making information readily available to anyone who has an internet connection.
And they do it for free.