This is a long entry, but bear with me, cuz it’s worth the read in its enlightening information. I was enlightened!! You will be too!
So, as someone who exploits many aspects of the Internet (Twitter, newsfeeds, etc.) to generate news content for all of you, my dearest ones, the issue of SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) is concerning.
But as with most things, the uproar is aimed at sloppy and broad statements made in the legislature in constructing the bill. Honestly. Who writes this stuff, and why is it all so sneaky all the time?
Bottom line, SOPA targets sites for content that a posting entity may not own. Ok.
Problem is, as the bill is proposed, if someone posts “pirated” material to a site like, say YouTube, the bill would allow the government to shut the WHOLE site down and arrest it’s management. So your access to your material goes away, legal or not.
See further explanations below…
From Wikipedia…
“The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a U.S. House bill to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. Proposals include barring advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with allegedly infringing websites, barring search engines from linking to the sites, and requiring Internet service providers (ISP) to block access to the sites. The bill would criminalize the streaming of such content, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
User-content websites such as YouTube would be greatly affected, and concern has been expressed that they may be shut down if the bill becomes law. Opponents state the legislation would enable law enforcement to remove an entire internet domain due to something posted on a single blog, arguing that an entire online community could be punished for the actions of a tiny minority. In a 1998 law, copyright owners are required to request the site to remove the infringing material within a certain amount of time. SOPA would bypass this “safe harbor” provision by placing the responsibility for detecting and policing infringement onto the site itself.
Lobbyists for companies that rely heavily on revenue from intellectual property copyright state it protects the market and corresponding industry, jobs, and revenue. The US president and legislators suggest it may kill innovation. Representatives of the American Library Association state the changes could encourage criminal prosecution of libraries. Other opponents state that requiring search engines to delete a domain name begins a worldwide arms race of unprecedented censorship of the Web and violates the First Amendment. The bill could make some proxy servers and the Tor project illegal.
On January 18, the English Wikipedia, Reddit, and several other websites coordinated a service blackout to protest SOPA and its sister bill, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA. Other companies, including Google, posted links and images in an effort to raise awareness. An estimated 7,000 smaller websites either blacked out their sites or posted a protest message. A number of other protest actions were organized, including petition drives, boycotts of companies that support the legislation, and a rally held in New York City.
In response to the protest actions, RIAA stated “It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users and arm them with misinformation,” and “it’s very difficult to counter the misinformation when the disseminators also own the platform.”"
But…
An analysis from someone who’s studied the economics of the thing:
“Piracy is a very interesting situation currently. As someone with a strong background in economics and who’s researched the subject, things basically work out like this:
With video game piracy piracy reduces sales by about 20%
With movie piracy it reduces sales by about 30%
With music piracy it reduces sales by about 50%
Here’s the thing though, you can’t just look at the raw numbers. In economics everything is interconnected and it’s a system that is interconnected. The sales figures don’t tell you much at all.
The point is that piracy has far reaching effects. Not only does it reduce sales but it also increases consumer interest. What that means is more people are more interested in media because of piracy. If piracy ended today the music industry would see increased sales, but then guess what? People would be less interested in music because it would cost money. In fact most projections show that all things being equal fewer people would buy music in the long run, not more if piracy ended. Instead people would take other interests, instead of media such as going outside. People who want to spend their free time doing things which do not cost money generally do not want to migrate to doing something that costs money, they will migrate to doing other free things, and that would kill the media industry and make it less profitable than before, while shifting the money to things like outdoor recreation which will become more popular and draw the people who are willing to spend money along with the people who are not.
The other effect of piracy is that it loosens the grip of the media industry on which content sells and which doesn’t. Freedom of information tends to make media better because the media execs don’t control what gets pirated, only what is promoted through their networks. So the top song on a piracy website isn’t the same as the top song that is promoted by a recording label.
In other words piracy increases music sales and increases the quality of music, because people listen to what they want to instead of what the execs want them to listen to.
The other side of the issues is the unintended consequences of anti-piracy.
Megaupload is the perfect example. Simply put the majority of their traffic was legitimate. This is a fact. Massive volumes of innocent information have just been wiped out. I’ve heard several reports of people losing their computer back ups as a result of the megaupload shut down. A close friend of mine had one of their children almost die from their computer not being backed up and losing critical medial information, and as a photographer my back ups are worth tens of thousands of dollars, these are both unrelated to the megaupload shut down but the point is deleting the innocent information of regular joes is extremely serious, and potentially costs millions of dollars and leads to all sorts of losses from trivial to life threatening.
For the record Megaupload was responsible for over 2% of the internet’s legitimate traffic. That’s a something truely insane to mess with as a government entity.
Generally censorship and anti-piracy is bad for everyone and it needs to stop.
I’m personally in favor of doing a model similar to the Apple App store where for one or two days a year an app is free
(free app a day program), and the rest of the time it’s cheap. The idea behind a free app a day is an extremely good example of the effects of piracy. When paying for digital content is CONVENIENT but not MANDATORY, everyone benefits. The content creators make more money, the content medium becomes more popular, quality goes up and people get more content at a lower price per content.
The effects of anti-piracy are ALL negative
- increased corruption due to dinosaur corporations trying to buy the government
- restricting the progress of technology to maintain a dying industry
- censorship
- lower quality content
- lower profit for content providers
- less content for the masses
- lower quality of life for the masses
- unintended consequences
- restriction of freedom #think TSA)
- staggering the growth of the internet and content
- putting non-violent non-criminal offenders in jail
- putting poor single mom’s in court asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars for two songs shared
Literally the only entity that will benefit from anti-piracy is the corrupt government officials that put campaign contributions before bettering the country.
Edited by Radiating at 01/20/12 5:45 AM”
So, after the blackout yesterday… See this Twitter entry:
SO… Want to see what the SOPA/PIPA blackout did yesterday. http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/images/sopa-opera-count.png
Amazing what it takes to get someone’s attention. But thank goodness we have the technology in our pockets to do something about it!
Rock on…!
That’s what I’d do…
