SOPA stands for the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’. If you’re a religious Wikipedia user or saw the big black rectangle over the Google logo last Wednesday, you’re beginning to understand that this might be an issue worth paying attention to.
Here’s the rundown; the SOPA bill would essentially let copyright holders – mainly of music and movies – have a legitimate complaint to the U.S. attorney general about a foreign website that commits violations of copyright law. The bill would let copyright holders censor sites that host illegally distributed content. Ergo, sites like Google would not be able to display the links of these sites as they would be considered providing an avenue for hosting illegal content. The problem, avid Internet-goers claim, is that by censoring the Internet in any way is a violation of free speech and fair use.
On the other hand, hosting illegal content like free movies online is just that – illegal. What’s the difference between taking a DVD and making 2500 copies to sell on a street corner, and making a copy to upload onto The Pirate Bay for everyone to watch for free? The goal is to make these sites “unfindable.” Google has an issue with that.
There is not a difference. The material is still pirated. There are people in the music and movie industry that suffer because of this. Can we honestly defend piracy?
But before you judge me for defending the fat cats in Hollywood, try to understand how the same process can affect the smaller creative industries.
Maybe this makes more sense hypothetically; you run an online newspaper. You have photographers that you pay to take and gather pictures for you, but there has been a breaking story and you don’t have any pictures of the event and don’t have time to get your photographer to get a picture for you. So you go to Flickr.com, and settle for a mediocre picture, but you get it for free. Now, imagine everyone who blogs and writes everywhere not having to pay photographers for their work because they can settle for half the quality from an amateur photographer at Flickr.com, so long as it is free. This is the problem that professionals are facing in the real world, and it can apply to nearly any field, because you can get almost any service for free from the Internet rather than paying someone to do it that specializes in it and feeds their kids by having that specialty.
As people get paid less and less for their work, quality goes down because more people become producers. Growth is then prohibited because the specialists aren’t getting paid enough to invest in further growth. More people are stuck on welfare because they aren’t getting paid for working, so the GDP goes down while debt continues to rise; meanwhile, the only people that have any money are people who know how to program computers.
All inspired creativity gets thrown out the window because if people don’t get paid for their original content, true inspiration for brilliant ideas is not worth as much as it used to be. It’s not even worth trying.
What SOPA should accomplish, if altered (a necessity now that it’s been vetoed), is force websites like YouTube and Facebook to monitor themselves for any pirated connections/links/materials. That creates more jobs, doesn’t shut down websites and copyright holders could feel less of a need to check for their content on these sites and focus more on their real job – creating original content.
Some teachers here at the university already allow students to use Wikipedia as a legitimate source for information. We can even cite it for research papers. But we seem to forget that Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, user-edited, bias-free and a collaborative effort. The Internet is the first step towards a universal mind. If SOPA gets passed, God forbid we have to think as individuals.
Though, when it all comes down to it, SOPA is about money. But more so than money, SOPA is about stimulating the economy. Disagree? According to reports, over 350 companies are in support of SOPA because they so desperately want to protect their original content. If these companies get the payments and royalties that they deserve, they will stay in business longer, thus providing more jobs for the people who work for them.
The popular claim is that these companies are becoming obsolete, and they need to pass a bill that keeps them relevant. The claim is that these companies are jealous that net-goers are able to use their content online, free of charge and persecution. It echoes ‘bailout’; the government helping these big companies.
This claim is preposterous. Isn’t it ironic that six or seven of the companies that oppose the bill make millions to billions of dollars by allowing people to steal content and post it? So let’s see, we can pass a bill that benefits hundreds of thousands of people at the 350-plus companies that support it, as well as anyone who ever has original content stolen from them. Or we can pass a bill that benefits a few hundred people at six or seven companies. And when all of those companies that support the bill have no money left to create original content because the Internet has been giving it away for free, the six or seven companies not passing the bill won’t matter anymore because they won’t have any decent content to actually steal from anyone.
People may get confused easily because these companies that are pro-SOPA are still making profits. Well, they ended sections of their industries, cut jobs and cut employment.
The White House pulled its support of SOPA last week after the panic of a Wikipedia-less Internet scared everyone into hysteria. So, sure. Veto the bill, Mr. President. But when movie studios and music studios get run out of business because all of their work gets pirated, there won’t be any content worth sharing, legally or illegally. And when fresh-out-of-college arts majors try to break into the real world, they’ll start to understand why they aren’t getting paid for their work.
So sit back, and keep downloading Supernatural and Ally McBeal from The Pirate Bay. This whole thing won’t hurt you until you feel it kick you in the teeth.