

SOPA is the problem and not the solution - brownday
http://aplusk.posterous.com/87693122

======
twainer
SOPA is a disaster but there seems to be far too much groupthink going on to
consider an obvious point: if people treated their internet with more respect
we wouldn’t be ending up here.

Forget ‘copyrights’ - forget boogeyman #1 RIAA and boogeyman #2 TPB -- if
there was even a modicum of respect for treating others - people who work hard
to produce content - fairly, treating them the way you’d want to be treated
yourself, things like SOPA would never have seen the light of day.

But instead we get movies posted to streaming and torrent sites before they
are released. Entire albums leaked before they drop. iPhones jailbroken so
apps can be ripped off. Game-consoles hacked so that people can play games
without paying for the service. The list goes on and on and on. It’s a culture
of petty thievery. The definition of sharing needs to change, for sure, but
it's new definition will never be like the start of this paragraph.

What we have now is a totally unbalanced system. As noted elsewhere, it is
like the older generation who thought a one-way relationship with planet earth
was as reasonable as it was convenient - take whatever you need, dump whatever
you don’t - nothing bad will ever come of it and if it does it’s always
someone else’s problem.

“I don’t need to pay for this movie - plenty of people already have.” “I don’t
need to recycle - so many people are already doing that.”

“So even if some bands don’t make it, there’ll always be other bands. They
need to adapt” “We’ve got so many species, is it a big deal if we lose some?
That’s evolution isn’t it?”

“I don’t feel bad ripping stuff off - I spend plenty of money on media
anyway.” “I don’t feel bad about dumping garbage in the woods - I pay my
taxes.”

When you live like that, you live with the consequences of having no regard
for the balance of the system - and you reap the whirlwind you whip up.

I don’t support SOPA - but I also think the total lack of respect for the side
of content-producers is a miserable state of affairs - and amounts to a
enacted prejudice against people who produce content, shamefully defended with
the language of equality and freedom. If one wants to release stuff for free
and seed their own torrents - they have every right to choose that ‘business
model’ - but to force that choice, to force artists into situations that make
them into sharecroppers - is consumerism every bit as wicked and morally empty
as capitalism has been. “Let them eat cake!” [Let them sell t-shirts] Does it
make it okay because Ashton Kutcher says so? To cover his investments and
enhance his street cred?

I don't have a solution for SOPA. I do have ideas about how to ease piracy in
a positive way - but no idea stands up when most people don't give a damn -
and they don't. Reading some of the exculpatory comments on SOPA/piracy
threads has made that embarrassingly clear.

~~~
marshray
_if people treated their internet with more respect we wouldn’t be ending up
here_

No this is not clear thinking, here's why: it only takes one person to upload
the prerelease movie. Any system where a 99% "respectful" rate of content-
consumers is insufficient is unworkable under any scheme. Perhaps downloading
is rampant among certain demographics, but there are open questions there
(e.g. about the degree to which that may simply represent a pricing failure in
an artificial monopoly-supply market).

Sorry to tell you this but, no, most people don't have a shred of respect for
the handful of media conglomerates or their business model. They're notorious
for ripping off the artists they supposedly "represent".

 _iPhones jailbroken so apps can be ripped off_

I'm sorry to ask this, but are you just trolling? Everyone I know jailbreaks
their iPhones and none of them are ripping off apps.

SOPA/PIPA represent a choice we have to make. Are we better off as a
civilization with a happy entertainment industry and censorship-happy
government or with a well-functioning and free Internet where an entrepreneur
can start a website (and maybe even make a buck) without an army of lawyers?

It's pretty obvious to me it's the latter.

------
blhack
If you're curious why Ashton Kutcher is commenting on this: a couple of years
ago he got into tech venture funding. He has a financial interest (and also
hopefully and ideological one) in seeing SOPA fail.

~~~
tomhoward
Though as film/tv actor, he also has an interest in seeing it succeed - if
SOPA will help the film/tv industry as its proponents claim.

It would be great to see some film/tv identities with more clear-cut loyalties
to come out in opposition to SOPA.

------
milkshakes
(ashton kutcher) -- have other actors spoken out against sopa yet?

~~~
biturd
Bieber has. Kutcher could do with a spelling and grammar check and actors
shouldn't use the words "bad actor" dammit!

------
earbitscom
Ashton may be right about SOPA but he's wrong about the DMCA, and failure by
the tech community to recognize the shortcomings of the DMCA is why media
companies continue to take it upon themselves to propose new legislation that
overreaches. The first step toward avoiding bills like SOPA is to recognize
that the DMCA is not working, and then work together to fix it.

The problem with the DMCA is that not only are you asking artists, authors,
independent labels, publishers and others to police the entire internet for
their content, but there is no penalty for sites based on widespread
infringement across multiple parties. Most of these companies and content
creators do not have the means to sue these companies individually, nor would
it be equitable. So, you get sites like Grooveshark who respond to takedown
requests, then let the content go back up, then take it down, then let it go
back up. No individual content creator or independent label has the means or
motivation to sue them, and there is no penalty for infringing on a massive
scale because there are only civil penalties. Only when the major labels no
longer find it funny is there potential recourse, and then only for those
labels, even though a massive amount of the value that was taken was from
other creators. In the meantime, a massive business was built on the backs of
copyrighted material - and they're right here in the US.

The route to addressing the shortcomings of the DMCA is two-fold:

\- Centralize the way in which takedown requests are issued, tracked,
processed and tallied. Score companies based on their compliance history and
penalize them for repeat violations of the same content without requiring the
content creator to drag them into court. Leverage government resources to
penalize these companies and distribute the monetary penalties to all those
who had to issue multiple takedown requests.

\- Recognize that there are companies whose sole purpose is to provide access
to infringing content, and that protecting the rights of content creators is
more important than protecting the rights of these low-value companies. Once
you've defined a very high threshold for identifying these parasitic
companies, be prepared to shut them down.

Until these things happen, and also until the tech community stops defending
piracy under the misguided banner of "free information", you're going to keep
getting SOPA in its various forms year after year. Let's stop waiting for that
to happen, and fix the DMCA.

I wrote more about that here: [http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/a-real-
alternative-to-s...](http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/a-real-alternative-
to-sopa-or-fixing-the-dmca/)

~~~
burgerbrain
I _wish_ I lived in the dreamworld where the primary problem with the DMCA is
that it's too hard on _IP owners_.

~~~
earbitscom
It's too hard on everybody, and equally ineffective. If you don't think it's
too hard for IP owners, talk to a couple independent labels.

~~~
Natsu
> It's too hard on everybody, and equally ineffective.

That, in a nutshell, is why most people hate SOPA.

