So I was talking to some people not in our generation about SOPA. I say “not in our generation” because I’m pretty sure everyone in our generation understands that this is an incredibly shitty piece of proposed legislation.
But for all those that don’t feel this way, and honestly accept that this is both a reasonable and effective way to fight online piracy, here’s my case against SOPA/PIPA.
The truth is, this isn’t really about piracy. It’s about old media attempting to maintain the kind of monopolistic control over entertainment content that they’ve had in the past. And I don’t mean just in the sense of being afraid of piracy.
Let me give you an excellent example. I don’t have a TV and thus can’t watch cable. But I do want to watch the NBA. The NBA offers something called “League Pass” where for $30 a month I can watch my favorite 5 teams online on my computer, in crystal-clear quality, anywhere I go. Sounds great! Except, because the cable companies are trying to monopolize content to force me to get cable, I’m not allowed to see any of the best games with League Pass because they’re being shown on cable channels like TNT and ESPN. Because of this, League Pass is useless, because they only show bad games like Bulls vs. Terrible Team. So I canceled the service. Now I watch no games and pay no money, and I see no advertisements from the game so there’s no ad revenue from my viewership. Most of my friends are in a similar situation, and so some of them do the next best thing: they watch streaming copies of the games on pirate sites. They still see the ads, so the TV stations are still getting ad revenue, but Comcast et al have lost control of the monopoly. They can’t force us to pay lots of money to buy a TV, cable, and then only sit on our couches and watch it. We can stream it on our computers, our iPads, our iPhones, anything with internet.
This leaves the cable companies two options.
1. Exploit new media and bring their content to us on the web that allows us to pick and choose what we want and buy that, knowing that, yes, we will share it with some of our friends, but we’ll also be so delighted with the convenience that in the long run we’ll buy and view more of it. Or,
2. Get Congress to clamp down on all internet freedom in a futile attempt to stem the tide of future technology. It’s a repeat of when the music industry went after Napster. Shutting down Napster accomplished nothing, because other free download sites proliferated. It was only the arrival of iTunes that saved the industry. Yes people still share files, but they also buy tons of music off the web now and they love it.
SOPA would suck even if it was just a misguided attempt to live in the glory days of only 3 TV channels and no internet. But it’s worse than that, because it doesn’t just go after illegal offshore pirate sites. It would force Google and Youtube and Facebook and Wikipedia et al to police their own user-contributed content to make sure it’s not violating copyright or linking to those illegal offshore pirate sites. The prohibitive costs of doing so would destroy many of these sites, and the arguably the user-content-contributed internet as we know it. It would effectively turn the internet into TV, a one-way channel where you can receive but not participate, give, or exchange.
And that’s why SOPA would be a bad law.
About Joe Geni
- Web |
- More Posts (24)
Recent Comments