SOPA is the problem and not the solution

SOPA is a disaster but there seems to be far too much groupthink going on to consider an obvious point: if people treated their internet with more respect we wouldn’t be ending up here.

Forget ‘copyrights’ - forget boogeyman #1 RIAA and boogeyman #2 TPB -- if there was even a modicum of respect for treating others - people who work hard to produce content - fairly, treating them the way you’d want to be treated yourself, things like SOPA would never have seen the light of day.

But instead we get movies posted to streaming and torrent sites before they are released. Entire albums leaked before they drop. iPhones jailbroken so apps can be ripped off. Game-consoles hacked so that people can play games without paying for the service. The list goes on and on and on. It’s a culture of petty thievery. The definition of sharing needs to change, for sure, but it's new definition will never be like the start of this paragraph.

What we have now is a totally unbalanced system. As noted elsewhere, it is like the older generation who thought a one-way relationship with planet earth was as reasonable as it was convenient - take whatever you need, dump whatever you don’t - nothing bad will ever come of it and if it does it’s always someone else’s problem.

“I don’t need to pay for this movie - plenty of people already have.” “I don’t need to recycle - so many people are already doing that.”

“So even if some bands don’t make it, there’ll always be other bands. They need to adapt” “We’ve got so many species, is it a big deal if we lose some? That’s evolution isn’t it?”

“I don’t feel bad ripping stuff off - I spend plenty of money on media anyway.” “I don’t feel bad about dumping garbage in the woods - I pay my taxes.”

When you live like that, you live with the consequences of having no regard for the balance of the system - and you reap the whirlwind you whip up.

I don’t support SOPA - but I also think the total lack of respect for the side of content-producers is a miserable state of affairs - and amounts to a enacted prejudice against people who produce content, shamefully defended with the language of equality and freedom. If one wants to release stuff for free and seed their own torrents - they have every right to choose that ‘business model’ - but to force that choice, to force artists into situations that make them into sharecroppers - is consumerism every bit as wicked and morally empty as capitalism has been. “Let them eat cake!” [Let them sell t-shirts] Does it make it okay because Ashton Kutcher says so? To cover his investments and enhance his street cred?

I don't have a solution for SOPA. I do have ideas about how to ease piracy in a positive way - but no idea stands up when most people don't give a damn - and they don't. Reading some of the exculpatory comments on SOPA/piracy threads has made that embarrassingly clear.

If you're curious why Ashton Kutcher is commenting on this: a couple of years ago he got into tech venture funding. He has a financial interest (and also hopefully and ideological one) in seeing SOPA fail.

(ashton kutcher) -- have other actors spoken out against sopa yet?

Ashton may be right about SOPA but he's wrong about the DMCA, and failure by the tech community to recognize the shortcomings of the DMCA is why media companies continue to take it upon themselves to propose new legislation that overreaches. The first step toward avoiding bills like SOPA is to recognize that the DMCA is not working, and then work together to fix it.

The problem with the DMCA is that not only are you asking artists, authors, independent labels, publishers and others to police the entire internet for their content, but there is no penalty for sites based on widespread infringement across multiple parties. Most of these companies and content creators do not have the means to sue these companies individually, nor would it be equitable. So, you get sites like Grooveshark who respond to takedown requests, then let the content go back up, then take it down, then let it go back up. No individual content creator or independent label has the means or motivation to sue them, and there is no penalty for infringing on a massive scale because there are only civil penalties. Only when the major labels no longer find it funny is there potential recourse, and then only for those labels, even though a massive amount of the value that was taken was from other creators. In the meantime, a massive business was built on the backs of copyrighted material - and they're right here in the US.

The route to addressing the shortcomings of the DMCA is two-fold:

- Centralize the way in which takedown requests are issued, tracked, processed and tallied. Score companies based on their compliance history and penalize them for repeat violations of the same content without requiring the content creator to drag them into court. Leverage government resources to penalize these companies and distribute the monetary penalties to all those who had to issue multiple takedown requests.

- Recognize that there are companies whose sole purpose is to provide access to infringing content, and that protecting the rights of content creators is more important than protecting the rights of these low-value companies. Once you've defined a very high threshold for identifying these parasitic companies, be prepared to shut them down.

Until these things happen, and also until the tech community stops defending piracy under the misguided banner of "free information", you're going to keep getting SOPA in its various forms year after year. Let's stop waiting for that to happen, and fix the DMCA.

I wrote more about that here: http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/a-real-alternative-to-s...