Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

Much has been posted online recently about the proposed US Government bill to stop online piracy commonly referred to as SOPA. This is one of the best videos summarizing the bill — http://vimeo.com/31100268

As the video says SOPA gives the entertainment industry and the US Government the power to block specific web sites, sue web site owners or the companies that provide web hosting, payment services or that provide advertising.

For example, somebody posts a video parody on YouTube (the Newport one came to mind but it’s already been taken down). Anyhow, let’s assume it was still there. The entertainment industry could have YouTube blocked, anybody that links to the video from their Facebook page, WordPress blog or other site. Paypal would come under fire for processing any advertising revenue and Google would also have to reclaim any advertising fees.

With SOPA you’d end up with site owners, service providers and many of the core companies that underpin the Internet infrastructure all in the cross-hairs of the entertainment industry and the US Government.

Where will this end up? It will end with everybody moving out of the US and innovation and creation moving somewhere where freedom of speech is still valued. Europe would be my best guess.

As the video points out it will not stop people downloading. That horse bolted a long time ago and it’s never coming back so the entertainment industry needs to find alternative ways of making us pay. We’re all willing to pay a fair price for creativity, but the industry is so corrupted these days with so many middle-men and restrictive contracts that nobody is willing to pay $15 for auto-tuned trash with no soul, or regurgitated movies with no creativity that blindly follow a get-rich formula; a dash of action, a pinch of romance, an anti-climax and a CGI-filled climax shot in vertigo-inducing 3D.

As SOPA drives US businesses and innovation overseas the Government will then be forced to use its control of the Internet numbering system to setup the Great American Firewall of Protection; so all of these ‘free’ sites and services can’t be reached inside the US. It will work exactly like the Chinese, North Korean or Middle Eastern firewalls whereby the Government decides what content is filtered but it will be sold as a defensive and protective measure. Anybody questioning the validity of such a mechanism will be unpatriotic, an anarchist or even a terrorist.

Eventually, the Internet may become so broken by this that the rest of the world will simply establish a new Internet; a dark Internet. One where nobody controls the content; one where lawlessness and law-abiding packets are exchanged; one where there is no Government interference; one where freedom of speech is still permitted and one where people can still do what they want to do. Just like the Internet we have today.

There are problems with existing laws today and their effectiveness in dealing with illegal activity on the Internet but it mostly works. It isn’t perfect but it does work. The US entertainment industry has too much power right now and it’s only getting worse. Why do we feel the need to keep extending copyright law to protect Disney? Europe was producing literature and music for centuries before the US and never felt the need to extend copyright just because Mozart was getting old or Dickens’ estate needed to top-up its bank balance. So why are US companies so well protected? At this rate we’ll be extending Intellectual Property rights for years to come and stifle innovation. We already have massive patent wars occurring between mobile companies where one company is using the law to pull competitors products off the market even though they’re all as guilty as each other. They patent the most obvious user interface elements, like auto-detecting a telephone number and attaching a click-to-call function, and then use it to stop other companies using the same feature. How is this IP squabbling helping anybody?

SOPA will not kill the Internet, it will just kill the Internet as we know it within the confines of the US. Hosting companies will simply move overseas. Google, Paypal and others will move or be replaced by Chinese or European start-ups. Rather than the US having the best Internet connectivity, Eurasia (a much larger contiguous space) will simply take-over and the US will become the tag-along.

SOPA will kill American domination of the Internet. If America no longer values the freedoms that created the Internet in the late 1960s then it deserves to lose it. The Internet, for all of its rough edges and imperfection, will continue to survive. We simply have to find a way of making it work. The US entertainment industry needs to have a long hard look at itself and maybe accept that the business models of the 1950s just don’t apply today — you’ve had your glory days, move on. Just as the horse and cart business lost out to Mr Ford, you need to adapt and find a way of making money.

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