Why SOPA and PIPA Are Bad News
A few reasons for why the bills are bad:
First, the blocking would be overbroad. Proponents of the bills argue that the bills are narrowly targeted at infringing content. Unfortunately, infringing content is frequently "bundled" with non-infringing content. For instance, it's technically difficult to censor the parts of your Facebook news feed that violate copyright law without blocking Facebook altogether. Yet because the bills penalize Internet intermediaries who under-censor but immunize those who over-censor, even a narrowly tailored court order would likely result in the take-down of perfectly legal content.
Moreover, the U.S. government hasn't exactly shown a great deal of competence in discriminating between legal and illegal sites. For example, DHS recently seized the domain name for the Dajaz1 blog on the grounds that site was dedicated to violating copyright laws. But DHS never filed charges or initiated court forfeiture proceedings. It took over a year before DHS admitted it made a mistake and returned the domain name to its owner. That's under existing laws. Give the government an even bigger hammer, and more sites will start to look like nails.
Second, the anti-circumvention provisions would hurt human rights activists. SOPA would criminalize the distribution of technology that could be used to circumvent the Great Firewall of America. But that same technology is also used to circumvent the Great Firewall of China. From a political perspective, there's a huge difference between censoring the Wikipedia article about the Tiananmen Square protests and censoring The Pirate Bay. But from a technical perspective, there's none. In going after pirates, SOPA and PIPA would trample all over the community of developers assisting political dissidents in countries like China and Iran.
Finally, the bills would make the Internet less secure. Some of the proposed measures would mess around with the inner workings of the Internet's domain name system (DNS). One proposal would let the Attorney General redirect all requests for a pirate website to go to a special page notifying users that the website was taken down. Unfortunately, there's little technical difference between that and redirecting all requests for a banking website to a special page that steals your password. In effect, SOPA would break technology designed to protect your personal information and online identity.
So ... bad news all around. To learn more, visit americancensorship.org. And call your Senators and Representatives!
posted by A. Fong at 1:59 AM
21 Comments:
I don't understand why people have also not brought up the benefits that "piracy" has brought us. If we didn't have piracy we would still be going to the local record store instead of iTunes, the shitty blockbuster instead of netflix streaming, paying monopoly cable rates instead of Hulu Plus.
This entire movement is led by an MPAA which deeply regrets that we do not still exist in the 70s with our VCRs (which of course shouldn't have recording capablity to preserve copyright). Hopefully people can recognize that even piracy spurs innovation, and this entire movement is being led by a dated industry which resents all the progress America has made in the last 50 years.
Thanks for breaking it down for the non-tech savvy among us, A. Fong!
Something I have always wondered is: does calling congresspeople actually work or is it mostly a waste of time?
Agreed (with Jackie O.), A. Fong. Also, how about some love for finally-turned-in-grades-Bamb*rger!
@7:53 AM: Adrian Johns comes close to addressing the benefits of piracy in Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.
@8:32, yes, calling helps. In aggregate at least. Congress probably won't be paying attention to any of the details you bring up, but Congressional staffers do keep track of the total number of people who call for or against an issue.
Save your cell minutes. President has already said he won't sign it as is. Might as well start yelling down a well, just as productive.
If you're going to call anyone, call the US Chamber, as their support for this bill is unconscionable.
Random hilarity: Twitter's rallying cry against SOPA is now "Save Porn"
Is there anyone out there in favor of SOPA/PIPA that wants to chime in?
I haven't done any research into it, but the idea of blocking sites that post or enable the posting of material protected by copyright or other IP protections seems alright to me. Maybe it is overbroad, but I don't have any problem conceptually with shutting down YouTube because it allows people to post copywritten material.
I keep hearing the phrase "save the internet," and I feel like it is rather deceptive. The internet is meant to be a place to freely exchange ideas and hasten global discourse, not to profit from, or otherwise exploit, the work of another.
Like I said, as drafted, the proposals may be overbroad. But that isn't to say that the end goal is wrong.
Just my $.02
Any website which allows users to submit content of any kind could be de-listed at the request of private entities. The problem isn't merely the over-breadth, but also the ability of major media companies to request take downs on their own.
And I fail to see the problem with that. If the content is protected by copyright, why shouldn't they be able to shut down a website that allows protected content to be exploited?
I understand that everyone feels indignant when they cannot post whatever burning thought they think the world cares about, but, unfortunately, we have laws that protect people from exploiting property of others.
Maybe there is a reason why it does not infringe on the copyright, or there is some other explanation as to why it should be allowed to be posted. But simply because a lot of websites would be shut down, that just, to me, means a lot of websites, including websites people really really like, infringe on copyrights or permit people to infringe on copyrights.
@1:30
"If the content is protected by copyright, why shouldn't they be able to shut down a website that allows protected content to be exploited?"
Under that reasoning, we should have banned VCRs in the 1980s because they could be used (and were used) for copyright infringement. The reason we don't is that VCRs have substantial non-infringing uses.
Likewise for YouTube. Yes, YouTube is used for infringement. But it's also used for all sorts of legitimate non-infringing activities. This is true of virtually every major service on the Internet - Blogger, e-mail, Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia, forums, Dropbox and so on all contain a mixture of legal and illegal content.
In YouTube's case, the DMCA struck a balance. So long as YouTube agreed to remove infringing content when it was discovered, it isn't required to check every video uploaded for infringement.
From the policy perspective, this kind of safe harbor makes a lot of sense. First, it simply wouldn't be economically feasible to build YouTube, Blogger, or any number of sites if they were required to monitor every piece of content for infringement. Second, it's simply undesirable in many cases. I don't want Google scanning my private e-mail messages for copyrighted content. Finally, websites and tech companies aren't the best situated to monitor copyright infringement. If I upload a music video to YouTube, YouTube has no way of knowing whether I own all the necessary rights to do so. Nor is it always clear whether a particular video is protected by the fair use and other fuzzy exceptions to copyright law.
The problem with SOPA / PIPA is that this sort of balance is missing. If a foreign website has a mix of infringing and non-infringing content, there's no mechanism through which rights holders can work with the website to selectively take down only infringing content. Instead, it creates incentives for Internet service providers and rights holders to take down everything, both good and bad.
I'm conceptually okay with shutting down illegal websites. But it's important to limit the collateral damage. With SOPA, the collateral damage is potentially large enough that "Save the Internet" isn't far from the truth.
tldr version: When everything violates copyright law, maybe copyright law should ease up.
@ A. Fong 2:06
That seems to me the missing link in most of the conversations about SOPA and PIPA. To me, the real problem here is how ridiculously over broad copyright is, even putting aside the various problems with how SOPA/PIPA are drafted.
In an interview this morning, Jimmy Wales basically said that we have to go to the drawing board to create a bill that would go after piracy without the incident censorship, technological problems, etc. That won't fix this root problem.
Thoughts?
Mohammad, if I were currently working for a web start-up, I would appreciate clearer (and more lenient) rules for fair use and secondary liability.
That said, I'm happy enough with just maintaining the status quo. The root problem (in my opinion) is that folks have drastically overestimated the impact of piracy. Piracy is a lot like shoplifting. Yes, it's harmful -- but it's not such a pressing problem that we need massive legislation on it.
Given enough time, I think content producers will figure out how to live with pirates, just as retailers learn to live with shoplifting. Or how society is learning to live with littering, speeding, and underage drinking. That doesn't mean we should legalize any of those activities, just that we don't over-react.
One way content producers are learning to live with piracy is to monetize them. SOPA / PIPA supporters often point to China as a "working" example of website blocking. Oddly enough, China doesn't use its censorship system all that much to control piracy. As a result, almost no one pays for music in China. Yet the Chinese music scene is actually thriving, largely thanks to product placement and tickets from live performances.
Let's admit it. We live and breathe the Internet. SOPA and PIPA, if approved will surely change the way we use the Internet, or how we use it anyway.
A. Fong,
I'll admit that most of your comments on this post are well thought out. Some even appear to be correct. But comparing shoplifting to online piracy is a bit of a stretch, no? I'm no retail expert, but I can't imagine that the percentage of goods shoplifted from brick and mortar stores even remotely approaches the amount of product "shoplifted" from content creators on the internet. In fact, if those percentages were close to equal, I think we might need to give shoplifting a new name--looting.
SOPA and PIPA may not be the solution, but there is a problem here beyond what your post seems to imply.
2:21, I don't think the shoplifting analogy is far-fetched. Shoplifting costs retailers some $11bn per year. In contrast, the losses caused by movie piracy are about $500m. See http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-congress/.
You're right that, as a percentage of revenue, the value of pirated content dwarfs that of shoplifted goods. But that drastically overstates the actual loss content makers suffer.
First, when something is shoplifted, it becomes unavailable to a potential buyer. There is a physical loss, and retailers have to increase inventory to compensate. This can be especially damaging given the thin margins that many retailers operate on. In contrast, when content is pirated, that content doesn't become unavailable to someone else. Hence no inventory loss.
Second, most of the losses claimed by content producers assume that every pirated piece of content is a lost sale. But pirated content doesn't imply a lost sale. If someone can't pirate a movie, that doesn't mean the person will then buy the movie. She might not have the money, or she might spend the money on ice cream.
Third, pirated content increases demand (and revenue) for non-pirate-able goods like merchandise, live performances, licensing fees, and so forth. So some of the lost sales are actually being cancelled out by piracy.
On another note, the "loss" suffered by content producers isn't the right metric. Much of the "loss" caused by piracy is really just a wealth transfer to consumers.
What we should care about from a public policy perspective is whether there's a sufficient incentive for content producers to keep producing content. I think there is.
People are still writing books. Hollywood has made record profits in recent years. Recorded music has taken a hit, but there's been an increase in music from independent artists relying on tools like YouTube and iTunes. And I daresay that music today is better than music from the late 90s.
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