T

Computer says No.

In the news this week and last has been the Stop On-Line Piracy Act (SOPA) which was up for a vote in the Senate. If you don’t know what SOPA is about then look here SOPA and PIPA: Just the Facts for a quick summary. In a nutshell, it’s about stopping people in the United States from downloading films and music from websites like The Pirate Bay and Megaupload by blocking access to those sites. Site blocking by governments is generally considered illiberal and the proposal made a lot of people very angry. They protested loudly and effectively and the bill was killed. Again, a short roundup is here SOPA and PIPA: What Went Wrong. There has been a certain amount of congratulatory back-slapping and hearty well-doning amongst Web activists (I suppose you might call them that). As it says in the second article linked above:

… no one — not supporters nor opponents — anticipated the massive response by Internet users, and no one could predict the effect the blackout, led by Reddit.com, would have on lawmakers and the legislative process.

Everyone underestimated the Web, “which is sort of the beauty of it,” said Maura Corbett, president of the Glen Echo Group and spokeswoman for NetCoalition, a tech trade group opposed to the bills.

“This was Outside the Beltway descending on Inside the Beltway, and we all just bore witness to it,” she said. “People are fed up. Washington is broken, and now Washington wants to subject the Internet to it? The Internet said no.”

Now, KOW readers–all three of you–will know that I am myself in the ‘fed up’ category. I too reckon ‘Washington’ (taken as a simile for ‘government’ by and large, including ours in Britain) is broken, out of steam, up the creek without a paddle (pick your metaphor) and I positively do not welcome it meddling. But… I can’t quite join the ranks of the gleeful on this one. The thing is while I’m not really sure that SOPA was a good cure for it we do have a serious ailment here. ‘Knowledge economies’ such as we are becoming, or you may say have already become since we tunnelled out the manufacturing things sector years ago, have to be able to get people to pay for the stuff they still do make which more and more is intangible and digital. That’s what it comes down to, right? It’s a security issue: how are we going to make our way in the world?

For my money, Andrew Orlowski gets it entirely right in this article from The Register White House Shelves SOPA… Now What? The gist of what he says: SOPA not really good but Silicon Valley needs to grow (and smarten) up. Along the way he makes some astute observations, such as this one:

China today mirrors the dynamic growth of the United States 100 years ago, and has the same buccaneering disrespect for other people’s stuff. Which leaves the question of how to compete. The West doesn’t do manufacturing any more, so the ‘intangible’ or ‘invisible’ inventions are much more important. The West can’t afford not to protect its inventors and creators: if it can’t, there’s nothing to build the service economy of the future upon, and life becomes a diminishing series of asset bubbles. This is simple, brutal economics, and Utopian waffle about internet freedoms do not cut much muster – at least not on a planet where unicorns don’t have the vote, and the emerging Eastern economies are delighted to take what they can.

I often find with discussions of things ‘cyber’ that we are too much impressed by how NEW and unprecedented everything and fascinated by the shiny new technology. It’s a bad habit because, as Orlowski points out, this isn’t at all a new situation. Perhaps Americans forget their own attitudes towards foreign copyright right up to the 20th century. It went something like this ‘oooh, shiiiny, let’s have that.’ No ‘thank you’ and no damn royalties either. Ever read Charles Dickens’ satirical novel Martin Chuzzlewit and wondered about its vicious anti-Americanism? It makes sense when you understand that American publishers at the time were taking his books published in Britain and reprinting them in cheap copies while not paying him one red cent for his efforts. What’s more they were selling these cheap copies into other English-speaking markets. In technical terms this is called ‘taking the piss’ and it pissed off a lot of 19th century ‘content creators’ in a big way.

OK, the shoe’s on the other foot, what goes around comes around, etc and so on… but allow me one more observation: yes, we should act to protect the digitizable things that our economy is good at producing otherwise, it stands to reason, the people currently making a living at it won’t be able to do so anymore. But we need to have a sense of perspective too. The United States stopped robbing Britain blind when it learned to innovate faster and make better (not just cheaper) stuff than we could. The larger argument, which Orlowski also notes, is about China and its rise. On which point I would say that their copying is not what should be worrying over the long run. It’s a good thing when you’re competitor is in your wake. That’s where you want them. Try it the other way round–it’s much, much worse. What should worry us is when they stop copying. That’s the sign that the culture of innovation, ingenuity, and constant reinvention which got you to the top in the first place has moved on.

{ 15 comments }