The reaction Washington had to the internet blackout over SOPA/PIPA kind of surprised me. I was under the impression that phone calls to Senators and internet petitions were meaningless window dressings to our faux-Democracy wherein bills breeze through Congress based on arrangements between lobbyists and lawmakers.
Every sensible person seems to agree the language of the bills were so broadly worded as to invite massive censorship. There’s still a need to crack down on sites illegally pirating work, as well as a general understanding about copyrights (and paid labor) that needs to take hold on the web. I’m real glad Reddit saved the internet. Now, any chance their users can learn how to credit creators and sources of copyrighted material?
Amid all the cries about the complete destruction of freedom as we know it, it’s good to remember that Facebook and Google are themselves hugely profitable corporations who haven’t exactly shown themselves to be totally awesome on the issues of copyrights and privacy, so I’m a bit wary of them as well.
Friday: S#*! Mitt Romney Doesn’t Say
Internet companies are football teams we root for, just like political parties. Damn your lofty principles. Elitist!
Well they backed down, but there’s new legislation being drafted to start over and implement a lot of the same policies. ACTA is different, but far worse that SOPA/PIPA.
So MegaUpload: Yes they did encourage a lot of copyright infringement and there was a legal process to pull them down. But a lot of people did use it for legitimate file uploads. One of the researchers I work with had his thesis backup on there. What would happen if it was Dropbox? Already, other major file upload sites are starting to close down or restrict content to their original uploaders. I know artists who have used those file sites to send me CDs that were too big to e-mail. Why isn’t the state responsible for violating the fifth amendment for taking property without just compensation (for those who had paid accounts and had legitimate content/material they owned that is now lost?)
The reason the Google/Facebook/Twitter giants are against this is because they depend on user generated content. They both have large legal teams that already have to deal with content removal and copyright violations. They don’t want to add to that burden, plus they depend on an ecosystem of other developers to write apps for their respective systems. They also haven’t lost anything in the past couple of years due to media decline.
I can’t find the graph now, but someone composed one which showed tech companies (Facebook/Google) profits/net worth over the past five years compared to Sony/BMG/other big giants. The IT companies growth has been about even where big media has had massive dropoffs; millions of each year. I think big media mistakenly thinks this is due to piracy, but really it’s so much more complicated. There is more content out there, a lot more independent music and movies. Also, a lot of movies that come out just plain suck. No one wants to pay $10 for a movie ticket when they can wait three months and watch it on Netflix (which gives people pennies per view, not bad for the giants but horrible for independent filmmakers). Also there’s this recession thing and people have better things to spend their money on…like beer.
Even if stuff like this passes, the media giants will still lose money and they still won’t understand why, meanwhile there will be legislation that can be abused by anyone out there. Look at how GE sued to be able to patent life because they made a bacteria that could clean up oil spills. The bacteria was canned because it also destroyed the environment, but that cleared the way for Monsanto to patent seeds, taking control of our entire international food supply.
Summit,
Point about Netflix. I had a friend work for Asylum, of Transmorphers/Giant whatver vs. Megawhatever else fame. They have a standing deal with Netflix and SyFy. Almost none of their money comes from DVD sales.
Of course, they skimp like crazy on costs and everything else, and their output is trash, but good movies have been made on low budgets, and at least one company seems able to turn a profit on Netflix revenues.
How much does a Netflix viewing earn vs. an old school DVD rental? It has to be comparable. I feel like a lot of the lost revenue is down to digital media not being as collectible. No one puts together .avi libraries like they did for DVD or VHS. Also, I’m not sure how theater overhead has SKYROCKETED, but tickets cost almost 3 times what they did when I was a kid two decades ago, and theater’s didn’t show a half hour’s commercials to boost revenue streams. That’s not inflation, and it’s sure not down to quality or originality of what’s being put on the screen. Sucks for the movie companies who are losing money, but that’s the new reality. Buggywhip companies didn’t get laws made to keep people from buying cars.
Full Disclosure: If I want to see a movie or TV show, I try Netflix, then I try Hulu or the network’s site, and if they aren’t onboard with how things are now, I go to Pirate Bay. I’d like to obey the law, but not if it involves jumping through hoops and pretending I live thirty years ago.
I realize that might make me sound like an entitled internet brat. Thought experiment time.
Go back to 1980. Tell a TV exec that there’s a new technology devastating the entertainment industry. It allows people to watch a TV show for free! Yes, of course you can charge advertisers the right to insert their ads into the show. Did we mention that it’s devastating the industry? How’s that any different? People expect to be able to watch the show anytime the want, and there’s technology that lets them do that without you getting money. Yes, you’re perfectly capable of making the content available, you just choose not to. Did we mention you’re losing buckets of money?
As for the movies, it’s a little more complicated, but just tell them people are going to want to rent more movies than they watch in the theater. Again, most people would probably pay in to a functioning system, but until one exists, they’ll just steal. As for music? As I understand, it’s been a rotten crooked cesspool since the payola scandals, and artists never got their fair share at any point. I have no pity.
Basically, it’s incumbent upon the entertainment industry to create, for their own profit and survival, what a bunch of hackers and programmers have created, at little benefit to themselves and great personal risk, the infrasructure to provide content in the manner to which their customer base now knows is possible and expects. Giving Walmart a head start on home movies, delaying the release of new TV episodes for weeks or months, DVD regions, and other distribution nonsense designed to preserve the previous scarcity and control of the market are just no longer acceptable. And totally optional.
@Matt: Its not so surprising really. Any time people at large have made a big stink about things in America politicians typically have done something about it despite being as shifty and corrupt as they are. Remember all those robocallers and phone solicitors? When they reached a critical mass the American public got rather vocally upset about it, and congress scrambled to pass through legislature for no-call lists and such to deal with the problem in response.
I used to send e-mails to Adam Schiff when he was my congressman. At first I thought they just went off into the ether as I only ever got form letters in response. But then one day I got invited to a small (roughly 70 people) reception he was throwing in my town. He might (or probably) never have read any of my emails but someone on his staff probably read at least chunks of them and factored them into his compilation of the aggregate sentiment of congressman Schiff’s constituency for latter discussion with the congressman himself at some sort of meeting. More importantly a few dozen emails bought me some face time with the man himself, which is huge.
Our politicians do listen, just not very well, and only because if they are totally negligent they will loose their cushy jobs. There is just a currency to these things and as usual the masses are poor when it comes to having valuable currency. A web petition with 1000 names on it is worth something like one really well written and sourced email, one hundred of either of which are worth maybe a minute on the phone with a staffer, one hundred of which in turn are worth maybe a minute on the phone with the politician in question, and an hour of which is worth maybe 1 minute worth of actual face time with said politician.
So why do things work the way they do if politicians are actually listening? Well, because corporate lobbyists get hours worth of face with these people almost every day (the most valuable of the influence “currency”), and yet the American public is more often then not too lazy to even sign a web petition let alone write an insightful e-mail.
If every issue got a SOPA level of response from the Public, most, if not all, would get a similar response from the politicians.
Google was opposed to SOPA. Google gave over 800,000 dollars to the Obama campaign in 2008. It’s not that hard to figure out…