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Caught In The Spin Cyce... Why You Are Probably Wrong About SOPA
Now that a national hissy fit has been thrown regarding proposed legislation to stop rampant internet piracy (thus cowing the bovine politicians we sometimes mockingly refer to as our 'leaders' into submission), I think we should look at the real issue at hand regarding SOPA.
Money.
Nothing more, nothing less. Unless you consider trafficking in stolen goods to be a valid exercise of your First Amendment rights. If you do, then please read no further.
Internet piracy is a real and devastating problem. It has decimated the music industry, and is in the process of decimating the movie and television industries. I remember the days when getting a song on a television show or in a movie was considered small potatoes, because there were much bigger fish to fry in the music business. Now, film and television is about all that's left. The rates they pay haven't gone up... they've gone down. Like a reverse adjustment for inflation. But you'll take a quarter when you used to make a dollar, if that's all that's being paid.
I'm neither expecting nor desirous of sympathy. I'm one of the fortunate few in this world who gets to follow his passion in life... partly from luck, partly from fate, with a good deal of help from friends and family, and to a large extent from pure narcissism and stubbornness. I just want to express an alternate view from what I perceive as being the near hysterical and borderline paranoiac view of SOPA that is now prevalent on the internet.
Money equals power. A tremendous amount of money has been accumulated by a few people who I will refer to as 21st Century Internet Moguls. In cahoots with these Internet Moguls are Internet Pirates. A gang in New Zealand just got busted with records of $500 million in profits last year from pirated material. That's a lotta dough. A pirate's $500 million profit is the rightful owners' $500 million loss. You can play semantic games with the logic of that, but.... $500 million here, $500 million there, pretty soon you've got a billion dollars. Annually. From one pirating site.
Because they operate from foreign countries, like Belarus or Estonia or wherever, these Internet Pirates are difficult to control. The douchebag in New Zealand apparently had a server in Virginia, and thus was breaking U.S. laws. And I'm sure the officials in New Zealand were more cooperative than the officials in, say, the Ukraine would be.
Being that it's almost impossible to stop most of this piracy due to jurisdictional issues, the powers that be from the entertainment industry (who I'll refer to as the Hollywood Moguls), in conjunction with such supposedly nefarious allies as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, went about influencing Congress to draft legislation that would allow them to stop this outflow of funds from the United States. In order to do this, they had to make culpable the participants who are in the United States, and thus subject to U.S. law.
Enter the Internet Moguls.
In order to make the Internet Moguls compliant, the Hollywood Moguls want laws with real consequences. My understanding is, as it stands now, if there is a complaint about copyrighted material being illegally distributed via Google or You Tube, they will voluntarily take it down. But this voluntary system is only stopping a fraction of the illicit materials being distributed. As soon as one site goes down, another pops up (ie. the same pirates just operate under a different name). Because this plethora of illicit material generates a lot of revenue, the Internet Moguls just look the other way until the proper complaint is filed. And so on. It's a wink and a nod system, with not even a slap on the wrist for the U.S. companies who are passively in cahoots with the Internet Pirates draining capital from the U.S.
I'm not trying to paint the Hollywood Moguls as being any more saintlike than the Internet Moguls. There are no saints involved.
People want the stuff that the Hollywood Moguls create, or there would be no illicit market for it and thus no problem. Not only do they create goods people want, they create lots of jobs. For writers, for actors, for technicians, for musicians and carpenters and painters and all the support people involved.
Most of those jobs are right here in America. Thus the involvement of the Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO.
The Internet Moguls create jobs, too. No doubt about it. And that's why I would like to see the debate take place on the merits of the actual issues at hand.
But instead, the Internet Moguls have done a tremendous spin job, turning the debate into one about the First Amendment, by putting out alarmist propaganda about how your First Amendment rights are being threatened.
It is my belief that nobody involved wants to take away our First Amendment rights. The Big Bad Government, the Hollywood Moguls, the Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO... none of them. What they want to do is stop Internet Pirates from draining American resources.
The SOPA legislation is dead in the water. Maybe it was worded poorly. Maybe it over reached. But the piracy continues. And something will be done. The Hollywood Moguls will not just roll over.
When the next legislation comes through, and it will, all I ask is you don't listen to the alarmist rhetoric which will be inevitably spread by the Internet Moguls, who, after all, have lots of money at stake here too. If You Tube is legally responsible for its content, it could arguably break the company. Google is already seeing less than projected profits for its last quarter. It has everything to do with the money involved. It has nothing to do with your (or their) First Amendment rights. If I'm wrong, then it's an issue that should be argued before the Supreme Court, not the Twitter Court.
The Internet Moguls will not roll over either. Nor should they. And the Internet Pirates certainly won't just go away. Action is needed, and will be taken. President Obama, politically astute man that he is, has distanced himself from the doomed legislation while simultaneously ordering his Justice Department to crack down as hard as they can on the pirates themselves.
My whole point is this. Because I believe us to be an intelligent people, I would like to see the public debate be based on the merits of the actual issues at hand, and not some sensationalist internet spin job designed to deflect attention from the real problem and its possible solutions.
Now, if I could only distill that down to a Tweet...
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Comment
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Comment by David Vidal on January 21, 2012 at 5:37pm
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So you can't give me any specific quotes from the legislation... only broad strokes of trouble with the very existence of any legislation that effectively deals with the problem of abject theft that is decimating an entire industry, and thus causing people to lose their jobs, their homes, their medical insurance, etc.
Did it infringe upon your First Amendment rights when Wikipedia shut down for a day?
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Comment by Maggie Friend on January 21, 2012 at 4:43pm
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Hey David, I didn't mean for that quote to be an answer to your question about how our First Amendment rights would have been threatened by this legislation. Rather, I was just giving you the piece that I think is of concern to information resources on the internet. It is not that sentence alone that gives me pause. I think that both SOPA and PIPA, as a whole, are threats to First Amendment rights for reasons that I have outlined below and in previous posts. In particular, the lack of protection from frivolous claims, the immunity from suit or liability for such claims, and the timing of the proposed legislation during a period of unrest in the world and amid concerns about the use of the internet for political speech cause me great concern.
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Thanks, Maggie. So the issue (I'm really trying to understand this, and not just arguing for arguing sake... there is literally billions of dollars of theft going on right now as we discuss it) is whether there is an adequate hearing for the alleged perpetrators of the crime before the cease and desist order is given. In the criminal justice system I'm familiar with, the criminal is first arrested, and then tried. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you seem to be saying is there should be a public hearing before the arrest. If that's the egregious sentence (and I do appreciate your sharing it), I don't read the subsequent extrapolation you made into it. I do think the concern is justified. And we're not talking just about major corporations... we're talking about major industries that provide lots of gainful employment for all kinds of people, from which billions of dollars of revenue are being siphoned illegally. I understand why Google doesn't want to be held accountable. But honestly, having read the sentence in question multiple times, I don't see how that infringes on your or my First Amendments in the slightest. Nor theirs. I think that argument is a smokescreen put up by Google and others who don't want the expense of having to police their own service. I don't blame them. I wouldn't want that expense either.
Lisa, you take responsibility for the content available thru your internet business, right? All the Feds are saying is that Google should do the same thing. And no, my argument is not that the government should have the right to search and seize with or without probable cause. My argument is that there's nothing that I've seen or heard about in the SOPA legislation that does that, or even comes close.
I've seen what online piracy does, up close and personal. And if it continues unabated, and the film and television industry is sucked dry as well, then my actor friends won't be able to buy me a beer. And if they can't buy me a beer, well I won't be able to have a beer at all. Cause Lord knows my musician/songwriter friends and I can't afford one any more.
While we're busy debating, the theft goes on. The big screen televisions are being carried out the door of the appliance store. I'm not saying we should do anything stupid about it... I'm saying I don't believe this legislation is stupid. I think it's smart, and necessary. And I'm saying that, speaking as an adamant believer in Constitutional rights, I find nothing threatening to those rights in it whatsoever.
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I believe the language that has internet companies like Google concerned is the following: "An information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, to remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order." Thus, although Google (substitute any search service here) is not directly dealing in potential copyright infringement, they would be responsible for removing any access to a site alleged to engage in such activity. Thus, there could be no public evaluation or discussion of the charge. Further, anyone attempting to prosecute alleged offenders or cooperate in such prosecution is granted express immunity from suit and liability. So, let's say that it is alleged that your internet business is engaging in copyright infringement. Your domain would be shut down and all references to it would be removed from any search engine. If you were exonerated, you would not have any rights to sue for damages even if your livelihood were destroyed. In addition, there is no provision to protect from frivolous allegations. So if you are engaging in political discourse on a web site and that web site is housed on the same server as say a music download site, the entire server could be shut down not explicitly for the content of your political speech but purportedly for the "suspicious" activity of another site on the same server. Importantly, it is not only the music and film industries behind this but also the pharmaceutical industries and the FDA. Whenever major corporations and the federal government conspire to limit the flow of information, it behooves us all to be concerned. This is not about the protection of individual artists and writers and scientists. This is about protecting major corporations even if it is at our expense.
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Comment by wiffledust on January 21, 2012 at 2:53pm
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isn't your argument like saying the government has the right to search and seize with or without probable cause otherwise they have no control over searching at all?
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So then the issue is whether the government should have any control over internet content at all?
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the answer to your question, david, is that by removing content that may or may not be piracy, removal of people's free speech would be inevitable.
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Still waiting. Honestly, I don't believe the phrase that supposedly infringes on your First Amendment rights exists in the SOPA bill, any more than weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq... but I'm way open to reading it if it does.
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Also (if anybody cares) I'd love to hear what specifically in the SOPA bill inhibited, restricted or in any infringed upon my First Amendment rights...
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So much of the argument I'm hearing reminds me of Tea Party responses to anything pertaining to gun control. As though limiting automatic weapons in cities somehow threatens the Second Amendment. I don't think it does, and I don't think First Amendment rights are particularly threatened by this. I'm sure the U.S. Government can shut down the internet in the United States right now if they want to. They don't need this legislation to do it. But no need to feel too weird about being in bed with the Tea Party. Watching the last Republican debate, the only candidate who agreed with me on this issue was Rick Santorum...
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