SOPA and Protect IP - A Rant

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last month then you've probably heard of SOPA and PROTECT IP. If you haven't, the short version is they are pieces of crap legislation that will allow large copyright holders to block and take down content in the United States over the Internet.


PROTECT IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011) will block traffic to "copyright infringing content" on the DNS level by re-routing it to a page from our government parents. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is an act that will empower the corporations to have content blocked/pulled on a whim prior to a court decision even being made. Shoot first, ask questions later? Let the rant begin.

In case anyone's forgotten, we're in a recession. During which the entertainment industry is still prospering. The corporate entities that are pushing for these bills are making more than their fair share already. Blockbuster stars and artists are really well paid. They're not starving. When the cassette tape and burnable CD came out corporations panicked and were proven wrong twice. Valve's own Managing Director Gabe Newell said in an interview with The Cambridge Student, "Piracy is almost always service problem [...] Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company." This basically means commercial entities need to deliver their product over a better medium. This will make "stealing" seem inconvenient and more risky. Apple does really well with this using iTunes, Valve does with Steam and Netflix does it with a cross platform/console service. It's groups like the Universal Music Group (UMG) who are kicking and screaming like infants in suits to defend an outdated business model.

Speaking of which, UMG is already known for abusing their "right" to censor videos in mediums like YouTube by using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After branding MegaUpload as a "rogue pirate sharing site" and seizing their domain, UMG proceeded to pull down a support video, made by popular artists, under the claim that it broke copyright laws. In truth, UMG owned none of the content in question. Prior to becoming a YouTube partner myself I used Daft Punk as background music for a video. It was pulled for copyright. Most readers have seen my videos and know that you can barely hear the music over the sound of the other content and my rambling voice.



This goes beyond YouTube as well. A good friend of mine made an artistic video (embedded above) with music he purchased in the background and it was yanked off of facebook with no question of whether or not it was fair use. No one wants to be the target of big scary UMG's copyright court battle. It seems to me you own everything you buy unless it's from the entertainment industry. You do not have the freedom of "fair use" or "possession" over the content that you buy and that is bullshit by itself without US Congress trampling all over whatever freedom we have left for creativity. As a good consumer who buys all of his content despite being able to pirate it at any time, I should have more creative freedom with the content. But like everyone else, my attempts to pirate media are automatically assumed and my content gets pulled down. If SOPA and PIPA/PROTECT IP get passed you can forget about uploading anything that remotely resembles copyrighted material.

To boot, things like PROTECT IP/SOPA will not stop piracy. PROTECT IP Only works on a DNS level. Know the IP of your favorite website? No problem! It's not like rogue DNS won't become popular in the US, either. Certainly not when SOPA will firewall a website just for hosting user posted links to "potentially copyrighted" material. It also sets a shitty precedent for laws to be made/amended elsewhere if one of the biggest Internet leaders starts acting like China (no offense Chinese readers!). Canadians are next door and Harper currently has the majority. I personally feel that our Conservative government in the great white North might just align with the US on this if they were pressured enough by global media corporations. That, however, is a different rant for another time. Included in this blog is an embed of Cynical Brit's rant on SOPA/PIPA. He's also got some great petitions for you American readers to sign - please take a few moments to look them over. And as always - please inform your friends. The more awareness on a global scale the better.


Let the people set the precedent - NOT the corporations.






Cynical Brit's list of petitions and informative articles:
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ngd4r/i_work_in_news_this_is_how_you_stop_sopa/
http://tinyurl.com/techdirtsopa
http://reddit.com/r/sopa
http://www.americancensorship.org
http://tinyurl.com/universalcensors
http://tinyurl.com/writetocongress
http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_internet
http://t.co/vIhyPU9z
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/sopa-vote-delayed/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/free-speechs-weak-links-under-internet-blacklist-bills