First, here’s a great quote, from a thoughtful blog post that questions the wisdom of letting Hollywood’s “legal arm” dictate to the justice system:
Surely Hollywood wouldn’t try to suspend due process, would they? Or create a parallel enforcement system? Or take away citizen recourse if they were unfairly silenced? They wouldn’t imagine the possibility of a longer jail term for streaming a Michael Jackson video than Jackson’s own doctor got for killing actual Michael Jackson? Would they?
That was written in response to this NYT blog entry, in which the author makes a few somewhat valid points about there being two different camps opposing these bills. However, that writer sympathizes with the entertainment industry position of “It’s very difficult to counter the misinformation when the disseminators also own the platform.” Maybe so, but that is the same frustration many people have felt for decades with the power to distribute movies and music being concentrated in the hands of a tiny group of people. Compared to the “disseminators” of the internet, these are much smaller groups with much higher requirements for entry. What’s more, the internet “disseminators” rarely own the platform. I own the content of this blog, but I don’t own the platform it’s served from – the hosting provider I’m paying does. The huge majority of websites that participated in this blackout protest also don’t own the infrastructure their sites are hosted on. They are more effective at getting their message out, because they’ve actually taken the time to learn how to use a decentralized platform. The entertainment industry, on the other hand, have stubbornly done everything in their power over the last 15 years to save their outdated, centralized propaganda and distribution networks – and always at the expense of everyone else in the world.
I think the first blog writer hit the nail on the head when he says “[Pogue] simply cannot imagine that the bills are as bad as they actually are.” I’ll take it a step further, and suggest that maybe Pogue (the NYT writer) has a flawed understanding of life in general, when he says:
At the same time, what the piracy sites are doing doesn’t seem quite fair, either. Yes, it’s a quirk of the Internet that you can duplicate something infinitely and distribute it at no cost. But that doesn’t make it O.K. to shoplift, especially when the stolen goods are for sale at a reasonable price from legitimate sources. Yes, even if the company you’re robbing is huge, profitable and led by idiots.
Well, no, piracy isn’t fair. So what? Life isn’t fair! And as far as the theft straw-man argument, I’m going to avoid it completely and say this: No one would argue it’s O.K. to shoplift, but people still do it anyway, no matter what laws are written. The retail industry acknowledges this when individual companies measure “shrink” and set an acceptable level for it. They acknowledge it as a fact of life and deal with it. Contrast that with the entertainment industry response of “It’s not fair! There should be a law!”
It also isn’t fair that RIAA and MPAA routinely hire companies that spider through web sites, at rates that resemble DOS attacks, eating up bandwidth and tying up hardware that the entertainment industry has not paid for. Instead of crying about life not being fair however, I and many other webmasters simply set up rules to block those companies, and that’s that. The “legal” criminals in other countries are harder to deal with, because they’ve spent more time refining their tools to make them harder to filter. Imagine if the entertainment industry had spent it’s considerable resources evolving the tools necessary to deal with those criminals, instead of hiring lawyers, hackers, and Congress critters. If they had chosen to make lemons from lemonades, they could be selling licenses to that software and have another source of revenue. However, what’s become abundantly clear the last few years, and even more so in the last two months, is this: The members of the entertainment industry never heard from their parents when they were growing up, that life isn’t fair, so get over it! Of course, they aren’t the only ones whose perceived status quo is threatened by disruptive technologies like the internet – they’re just the first to have to face the requirement to adapt or die. They have not adapted well, and they only have themselves to blame for that.
“Exerting leverage on companies here in the United States” will never stop overseas piracy sites, or even the domestic ones. (It’s also open to debate how wise it is to make ISPs and domain registrars enforcers of the laws Congress writes, instead of the Executive branch.). In all of the writing I’ve seen on this subject, there seems to be little knowledge about what a site like the pirate bay is, even though it gets mentioned so often. TPB is no more than a search engine for torrent files – specifically, files that will tell a bit-torrent client how to search a p2p (peer-to-peer) network for a specific file. There actually are legitimate files to be had by searching TPB (though admittedly legitimate files are easier to find on other sites). Let’s imagine the entertainment industry were to finally have it’s dream come true, and they were able to kill TPB for good. That act will not effect the existence of those torrents one single bit, nor will it even effect the ability to use a search engine to find those torrents, because there are many other sites that track torrents. Even if those other sites could all be shut down too, the bit-torrent network is still operating. The only way to kill that would be filtering the entire protocol at the ISP level – and as there are many legitimate uses for torrents, that act would be blanket censorship. The movie industry, at least, is well aware of this: it regularly examines bit-torrents to see who’s downloading them, in order to file their complaints with the ISPs. So, when the movie industry issues official statements like this, I see nothing but a disingenuous, duplicitous, former politician who’s twisting words to establish a witch-hunt, to rationalize horrible legislation. Even if one puts aside the issues with censorship and due process, and these bills are considered solely as anti-piracy measures, they are complete and utter failures. The current entertainment industry stance of “you’re either with us or you’re with the pirates” that is so irritating in it’s ignorance and it’s arrogance, insures they will remain so.
