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.
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Interesting post and thanks for the link to the Orlowski piece. But I think your last paragraph makes the “Valley’s snotty web teens’” (as Orlowski calls them) argument for them. Restricting freedom of the internet as SOPA would have done slows that very ‘culture of innovation, ingenuity and constant reinvention’. A completely free and independent internet is the West’s best tool to stay ahead of the competition.
The west certainly needs to come up with a better way to limit online piracy–but an MPAA-sponsored bill designed to go after teenagers downloading Glee illegally certainly isn’t the way forward, especially when if comes with SOPA’s side-effects.
SOPA would have done little to protect the sorts of people you are referring to who are having their products and inventions copied in China and then are undercut out of business. Nor is the Pirate Bay isnt going to go away because a piece of legislation in the US makes it more difficult to access and fund.
Taking the bit of SOPA ‘the internet’ found most objectional, DNS blocking of course is a hugely flawed method of blocking a site, easily overcome using proxies, VPN or simply by shifting your domain name every time it gets blocked and providing users the tools for auto routing to the new domain.
SOPA was a measure designed to protect the creative industries (Movies, TV, gaming etc), not to protect innovators. It had no international component, it would only stop Americans from accessing certain sites from their domestic systems. It would do nothing to stop a Chinese firm from ripping off an iPad and making their own, let alone stopping the Chinese consumer downloading Lady Gaga (I’m told thats what the kids are listening to these days)
Creative industries need to grow up and accept the internet exists and that the game is now about finding a price point and convenience of service that ensures that people don’t become pirates. The gaming industry was doing well at this for a while, with services like Steam, although increasingly that is being undermined by individual publishers. They also need to abandon global pricing policies which mean a CD sold in Washington costs the same as London and Dehli because thats a massive driver of piracy in itself.
How you protect the Apple’s and Steve Jobs of the future is a wholly different matter. That involves China and other countries agreeing that they will stop stealing stuff, despite it being in their economic interest to do so.
Thats a long way from undermining the fundamental architecture of the internet in order to stop Americans from downloading Avatar.
I am an opponent of SOPA, but I also think the “it’s the creative industries’ problem” defence is stupid.
Point 1: Creative industries are an export industry. America (and Britain) create products of sufficient artistic merit (or in Jerry Bruckheimer’s case, contain sufficient quantities of deafening explosions) and sell those products both at home and abroad.
Point 2: Creative industries used to have the monopoly on the distribution of their content, and they abused that to set artificially high price points. They don’t have that anymore and it is costing them big time. They tried to lever some stupid acts through Congress that would break fundamental digital infrastructure/neutrality, and it looks like that isn’t happening anymore.
Those two points aside, the whole “copyright sucks/download everything” argument is ultimately self defeating for anyone that enjoys music, films, books, video games, TV and so on. Without Hollywood – no big budget films, no profit from big budget films, no studios funding cool indie vanity projects that sometimes break big. Without publishing houses – Authors that are worth a damn can’t get paid, less authors worth a damn end up getting published (unless you’re a Chef, Celebrity or politician getting a ghostwritten autobiography, give up now unless you want to write young adult fiction about zombies) and those that self publish don’t get editors to tell them where their books are crap. We end up with a billion Stephanie Myers and books about goblins. And so on.
The point is, everyone looks at hollywood and they see Tom Cruise and a guy in a suit, smoking a cigar, and then they think of the change in their pocket and assume it’s a direct transaction. Making a 100 million dollar budget movie is just that, it means paying out 100 million dollars to people to make the movie. Sure, 25% might go to stupidly paid actors and the director, but the rest is going to average joes building and striking sets, spending 60-100 hours a week in front of a computer screen modelling special effects and so on. Those are the people that get screwed by piracy, because their industry is evaporating. No 100 million dollar movie, no job. The same is happening in the support structure for every creative industry, bar perhaps video games because Sony and Microsoft have sort of a lock on piracy (you don’t see those games for Steam prices). Directing a music video used to pay $10k, now those people are lucky to get $1k when they’re starting out, which is below minimum wage for the hours it takes to make one. Look at newsroom cuts across the globe, and beyond the fancy editorial staff, it affects everyone that supported them.
The industry does need to adapt, a little. It needs to be more open, but the attitude of “it costs too much, I’m taking it” is absolute crap. I don’t have any theoretical problem with someone who buys books, watches tv, goes to the movies and downloads from itunes running out of cash and downloading, if all their spare income is basically supporting those industries, but there is something very, very wrong where people take home a paycheck, blow it on “foodie” meals at expensive restaurants and fashionable clothes, and then take content from people/industries they haven’t paid a penny to support.
Re: your last paragraph, I couldn’t agree with you more.
There was a thread on the Reddit “books” board recently decrying the price disparity between paperbacks and ebooks of the same work. Surely, the logic goes, the ebook should always be cheaper and significantly so, given it is digital and does not require materials or printing. Yet, sometimes you find ebook priced even higher than the trade paperback version.
There are inevitably comments along the lines of “and THIS is why I just torrent the ebook.” Or people complaining about unskippable ads on DVDs: “the torrented movie is more convenient.” I always ask if they bought a paperback copy of the book and then illegally downloaded the ebook, or purchased the DVD but used the downloaded file since it was more convenient. “Well… no” is the inevitable answer.
I believe all of these justifications are ultimately garbage, and simply a weak attempt at resolving cognitive dissonance. The problem is that when the entertainment and media industry push back with such horribly overkill laws like SOPA & PIPA (bills bought and paid for in a way the average citizen cannot hope to match), it is easier for pirates to feel legitimate. It chips away at the “wrongness” of piracy, and soon enough people will not even have cognitive dissonance about their illegal downloading.
While I agree that giving pirates legitimacy is entirely wrong, arguing against them will do nothing to prevent copyright infringement.
That they exist is the key issue, and to simply take the moral high ground is to affirm pirates in their acts – of what they see as subverting a system they do not agree with. I must point out that I wholeheartedly agree with your point, but the publishers of this material have to learn the harsh truth. Adapt or die.
A very good post, and in the triumphalism over stopping a terrible piece of legislation, the fundamental problem remains: too many internet users expect to enjoy the fruits of others’ labour for free.
The problem, and the hypocrisy, as I see it is this. The wonderful thing about the Internet is its open architecture and potential for unprecedentedly broad and fast information exchange (and with this, it is genuinely a NEW! thing.) This is good, and should be protected.
But it is no good for Internet libertarians to be up in arms about protecting the fundamental freedom of the Internet when they are damningly silent, if not outright complicit in, flagrant and widespread copyright infringement. It gets worse; sites like MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay were actively and knowingly profiting from illegal activity. Where was the Internet outrage about this? There was very little, because most people like free stuff and the idea that information/music/films/content wants to be free, man, was very useful and self-serving.
So the problem is this. Until there is a cultural change in the way the average Internet user perceives the Internet – as a way of delivering content, fairly paid for or made free by legal design – the industry will keep fighting this battle. And the legislation will keep coming. Yet the outraged Internet user, at least at the moment, refuses to accept that this is a two-way bargain. For all its faults, the industry has shifted to innovative online distribution, and the industry has actually reduced the real costs of its products over the last twenty years. (Music albums and computer games cost roughly the same in nominal terms as they did in 1995; you can work out the rate of inflation over that period.) Yet millions of copies of games like Crysis, made available for the normal price via an online download, are pirated in the opening weeks of release. Incredibly, we are asked to believe that these guys, playing a game that demanded a top-notch PC costing over £1000, “would not have bought the game otherwise” despite then ploughing hours of their life in multiplayer gaming.
Gaming, movies and music may seem like trivial topics until you consider that they employ large numbers of highly skilled labour (like programmers, 3D designers, cameramen, etc), should generate vast export revenues (Asia loves our computer games), and be a source of revenue from Western innovation and skills.
And I don’t think you can seperate China’s industrial copyright infringment with that of the individual PC user. In both cases, the justification is ‘that we can’ and that ‘the creator of this content/patent/production process doesn’t deserve the extortionate rate they are unfairly charging’.
The main problem is the control of re-use/riffing on copyrighted works. Stop that, and you stop the internet, and you also kill creativity. The “creative industry” for want of a better word want to control all use of their output, to the point where no-one can create a meme with a copyrighted image, despite the fact that no-one is getting paid for it. Personally, I think the creative commons license is the best (perhaps only) way forward in a digital era, but it is almost impossible to distinguish between piracy and re-use.
At the end of the day this guy hits the nail on the head in the first comic: http://getyourcensoron.com/ it’s just a shame that the people who want to sell on the internet can’t tell the difference between a thief and someone making a Downfall spoof, and the internet’s defenders are forced to defend mass theft in order to defend their freedom to create.
Agree, but the proper course of action is to form an organised, coherent counter-lobbying movement to ensure basic safeguards of fair use, including satire.
Trying to defend the downloading of Rhianna albums and Call of Duty 3 is doomed to failure, and, worse, taints the legitimate calls for creative freedom. Tackle the piracy and then win the battle for fair rights.
@Jack and @AJohnson, I take your point, and I’m not trying to dismiss the impact that copyright infringement of the creative section of the economy has. It certainly does, although no one can actually say how much, which is one of the major problems when it comes to discussing the rights and wrongs of legislation like SOPA.
That said, I will stand by my point on the creative industries however. They will continue to have to compete in a world in which ‘free’ is an option, short of radically altering the internet, thats just a fact of life. The days of high profit margin physical media are gone for good.
Those services which have emerged which have gone down the route of lowering price and increasing convenience, Spotify for music, Steam for gaming, Netflix and LoveFilm for movies and TV have been welcomed by the consumer with open arms. Whilst at the same time sales, particularly of hard copy media, have declined.
I also take objection to the idea that “Without publishing houses – Authors that are worth a damn can’t get paid”. Self publishing on services like Amazon Kindle has given people the opportunity to get their books out there who might not have had the opportunity otherwise. I’ve found authors who I thoroughly enjoy who are self publishing and doing just fine out of it. Experiments in TV and Film along the same lines (Iron Sky for example) are showing that even the medium of film can be tackled by individuals and small groups at high quality.
The internet has given people who would once never have gotten a chance an opportunity to get on the long tail and make money out of it, outside the revenue stream of mainstream pro copyright companies.
I disagree re: self publishing. While self publishing might get a few books out there that are good, the ones that make it (statistically speaking) are zombie stories and fantasy books loaded with Mary Sue lead characters.
No-budget stuff can be great, take this for instance: http://io9.com/5878139/this-no+budget-science-fiction-short-looks-better-that-most-movies?tag=short-films
Note the films that they’ve worked on which perhaps allowed them the cash/creative freedom to make that for free: Green Lantern, Rise of The Planet of The Apes, Sucker Punch. Crap Hollywood, mostly, but they rely on those dollars in order to make something good that is available for free to everyone. That hybridisation is probably the future (people making money, working on cool stuff to give away) but it relies on some semblance of an industry surviving until it stabilises.
I can’t work out whether it’s more ironic or sad that, despite the greatest leaps in civilisation ultimately deriving from specialisation and professionalisation of labour, technological “progressives” these days hail a happy-amatuer model, essentially dishing out hobbyists’ content for free, as the future.
Yes, but software development has given rise to new business models whereby open source content is developed for free, and then companies get rich off tech support for blue chips that use it.
Another point would be that in art and culture, it might not be particularly good in any sense of the word to specialise things such as music. Is it better to have a handful of megastar artists or a culture in which music is a social activity performed by communities, for themselves?
And Chris, personally I am all for criticism. I understand that it is totally subjective, but the wishy washy ‘everything is equally valid’ stance is inane. I’d never censor anyone, but the point is that given the way things are going, ‘the market’ will soon abandon supporting anything challenging in favour of transformers 7, take me out and young adult zombie films, and I’ll be damned if I don’t call that a clear sign of the decline of western civilisation!
“Another point would be that in art and culture, it might not be particularly good in any sense of the word to specialise things such as music.”
How many of the great musical works of Western culture have been produced by amateurs holding down a full-time job?
I’m going to make one brief(ish) comment then bow out gracefully, as I think there is a genuine difference in views here which might be irreconcilable.
I think its dangerous to place a value on any creative work as to whether it is “bad” or “good”. Ultimately those are personal judgements, and in a world where there is more content there will inevitably be more stuff that on a personal level we concieve of to fall into the “bad” category. However, I’d argue that as a proportion of the overall content the same amount of “good” is still there.
*Groan* on the title to this post, Dr. Betz :)
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.’
That’s a great point. Nothing new under the sun. But it FEELS like it’s something completely new for digital immigrants and, unfortunately, that is the generation trying to write up all this doctrine-y stuff at the moment. My personal super-cheery belief is that we docs in the West are going to watch medical innovation move East because we are stuck in the status quo and can’t think our way out of it.
(Lots of people seemed to be into robbing others blind in other parts of the world during that era….
I never thought I was post-modern/anti-colonialist in mindset but my most recent comments here and at SWJ seem to have brought out a complaining side of me. I seem to harbor a few more historic resentments than I thought I ever did. Weird. Human nature, I suppose. Always a shock when it shouldn’t be. Anyway, ignore some of my nastier comments. I’ll get over it, eventually.)
I guess you have a license to use the Little Britain picture? Heh
touche