Before last week’s flame-out of the federal government’s latest attempt to seize control of the Internet, few had heard of Congress’ latest Trojan horses – SOPA and PIPA. These acronyms are, of course, benignly-named power grabs in accordance with the fed’s standard playbook for expanding its power. Do you remember the laughably-named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) which had neither patient protection nor affordable care in mind when this imperial overreach was created by the 111th Congress?
SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA stands for Protect Intellectual Property Act. The SOPA bill was birthed in the Senate and PIPA was a hatchling of the House, but the same wolf is wearing sheep’s overalls in both cases so just consider them two versions of the same Congressional bilge water.
Dare I ask who could possibly be against stopping online piracy or protecting intellectual property – except those who hate moms and are allergic to apple pie? Well, er, uhhh, me … and I love both mom and apple pie. Why my opposition? Because SOPA and PIPA are takeover attempts just as unconstitutional as the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold). Reform and protection weren’t the true purposes those two red herrings any more than gun control is about preventing criminal violence. People who break laws don’t think about law-breaking, only law-abiders do. And every time the airheads in Congress pass laws to prevent something, the law-abiders lose more freedom through compliance and the law-breakers are unconcerned and therefore unaffected.
Do I think there is piracy of Internet-based protected content? Sure I do. But the solution, if there is one (and there might not be), isn’t more laws. Here’s my argument. Judge for yourself.
For years Hollywood and the music industry have fought against the theft of their content. Relying on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) the industry of content producers and the industry of hosting websites have been self-governing and self-policing. Sites like YouTube and Facebook that receive notice under DMCA that their site is hosting pirated content are required to take down the content within a specific time period and, if they comply, there is no penalty. About 99.99% of the time, the system works well without a government nanny.
Without the help of SOPA or PIPA, a well-publicized instance of piracy was recently punished when Megaupload received an unannounced visit from the FBI. Arrests as far away as New Zealand resulted when copies of stolen movies and television shows were seized.
By way of background, some of us can recall the early days of the commercial Internet when content producers were so concerned about piracy and illegal downloading that they were reluctant to post their content online. Even before the Internet became of age, the record industry tried to prevent piracy by having CD burners on PCs outlawed and the motion picture industry tried to squash VHS recorders. Both were classic examples of mixing outcomes and methods into the same stew. Instead, saner minds prevailed and music and movie content can now be sold online through Netflix and iTunes in convenient and fairly priced transactions that are manifestly more civilized than some government meat axe solution could ever achieve.
Websites and e-commerce companies already operate under contractual agreements that assure copyrighted material isn’t posted. So when WikiLeaks tried to escape a hacker’s denial-of-service attacks on its old servers, it moved its content to Amazon.com servers but Amazon kicked them off. The reason was not to suppress free speech, as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights howled. It was because WikiLeaks wasn’t following the terms of service when it posted content it didn’t own or control, classified or otherwise – which strikes at the heart of the WikiLeaks business model. Then when WikiLeaks appealed to its supporters for donations to continue its operations, contributions around the world poured in through PayPal, the payment processor now owned by eBay. PayPal shut down the donation channel because it violated their "Acceptable Use Policy" which prohibits engaging in "activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity," which WikiLeaks clearly does by encouraging submittals of embarrassing stolen content. No SOPA or PIPA help was needed here.
As the Internet has matured and access has become more economical around the world, the problem of content piracy has grown and preventing it has become more complicated. Megaupload.com, for example, is based in Hong Kong but used servers in this country. Shutting down those servers was no problem. But how about content theft that is partly or exclusively located outside the boundaries of the US? Foreign-based content thieves don’t sit down with a US legal statute guidebook in their lap deciding how they can steal American content without breaking US law. No, they spend their energy devising methods that make terminating their operations harder. And they do it in a way so that getting “caught” is not a problem.
For example, illegally hosting content is soooooo “yesterday” because clever content thieves no longer host content. They host thousands, if not millions, of links to content residing on personal computers all over the world. Each of those personal computers hosts pirated films, music files, or software. This pirated content can be downloaded by anyone using special software, which in some cases causes that person’s personal computer to become a host in the network of links, perhaps without even knowing it. There is no legal basis for taking action against the primary link host because it doesn’t host any illegal content. Finding all of the computers in a distributed network is almost impossible.
Enter the powerful lobbyists for the content producers. They ask Congress, who are cyber-tards in this arena, to produce a law that protects their clients from these foreign content thieves. Thieves, of course, aren’t hindered by law, so this was a fool’s errand from the start. SOPA and PIPA are the result – bills written by Congressmen and their staffs who don’t know the difference between a hard drive and a diode. If SOPA/PIPA became law, it would give unprecedented power to Eric Holder’s DOJ to shut down any website with little provocation. For example, an entire website could be shut down if only a single user posts anything that a content producer alleges to be a violation – even something as absurd as a kid posting on YouTube her rendition of a copyrighted song or a person reading from a copyrighted book. Assume a bank robber sticks up a bank. Under SOPA/PIPA the DOJ can shut down the bank.
In effect, this would make every website, search engine, web hosting company, blogger – anyone who allows others to post on his site – responsible for what is posted. The web world would be turned into content cops, imposing an immeasurable liability cost on Internet companies.
And what if some government official didn’t like the political commentary coming from, say, AmericanThinker.com or PJMedia.com? With SOPA/PIPA as law, those and other sites could be shut down just as soon as there is a posted link to content at, for example, ABC News or CNN or the New York Times. If they claimed violations of their copyrights – and who hasn’t violated copyrights – the publishers of American Thinker and PJ Media could be charged and go to jail. Yep. Jail birds would be added to their resume.
Nawh, no one would ever take the law that far. Really? You mean like the TSA zombies who confiscated your nail clippers at the airport security gate? You mean like the lobotomized teacher in a government school (aka public school) who suspended an 8-year old for three days for pointing his finger at another kid imitating a pistol and made a “pow” sound – because the school was a “gun-free zone”? Power in the hands of government bureaucrats is guaranteed to result in an IQ equivalent to that of a Rhesus monkey.
Logically, one has to ask what economic loss occurs from piracy. The criminal who creates the content theft scheme wouldn’t have paid for it – law or no law. And the people who download pirated material knowing it is theft have already decided not to pay for it. I would argue that losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of a free and open Internet which fosters innovation and market reach. But a ham-fisted law that sets onerous penalties for web entrepreneurs and companies who can unintentionally violate it will have a chilling effect on Internet creativity and risk-taking. Rather than worrying about the lost revenue from content theft, it seems to me that content producers would be better served by devoting their energies to creating innovative methods to effectively expand their market so crime doesn’t pay – it isn’t worth the effort.
Steve Jobs showed how to do this when he created the iPod. Napster proved there was a large market for digital downloads although the only way to get digital music was to share files illegally. Jobs convinced recording artists that it was better to get some revenue than no revenue and worked out a revenue-sharing model if they would consent to allow digital downloads in the iTunes e-store. The first day that the iTunes store opened, there were a million downloads. Four months later, there were almost eight million daily downloads. Apple became the largest music retailer in the world. When digital music files became convenient and relatively cheap, theft became a hassle.
This is the point that the content producers are missing. A bad business model isn’t protected by law anymore than high tariffs protect domestic businesses from foreign competition. Tariffs shield businesses from being competitive and in the end they lose. Just look at the American steel industry which hid behind protective tariffs for decades as other world producers became increasingly efficient. Eventually, world producers were able to make a profit on a ton of steel at a price that wouldn’t allow American producers to recover their costs.
Anti-piracy laws produce the same outcome. The recording industry artists association could have come up with the solution that Jobs created, but it would have required a different business model than the one to which it was wedded. Their business model sold music in CD-based albums, forcing customers to buy music tracks that had no interest to them in order to get the one or two songs on the CD that they wanted. Jobs gave the market what it wanted with a business model that sold music by the song instead of the CD album.
Thankfully, within the last 60 days Internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia got wind of the government’s latest attempt to pull a fast one on them with their SOPA/PIPA Frankenstein. Internet companies and users quickly became activists when they learned how the government’s bill would interfere with the openness of the Internet. Last Wednesday, January 18, Wikipedia went “dark” for 24 hours to show what the Internet would be without it. The company posted a message encouraging people who hit their site to contact their Congressman and Senators. Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and over 10,000 websites followed suit, going “dark” in protest. An estimated 115,000 other websites posted online protests and petition forms. Google covered its logo, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg issued a comment on Twitter. Eight million Wikipedia users filed online petitions against the SOPA/PIPA bills. Seven million Google customers protested with Google’s form, three million tweets were sent and over a million telephone calls were made. There were so many incoming emails to the Capitol that inboxes were full and servers ran at full capacity.
Senators and Representatives got the message. Of those who had taken a position favoring the bills, most jumped ship. A majority of those who hadn’t taken a position lined up in opposition to SOPA/PIPA. When Senate Democrat Leader Reid saw he didn’t have the votes, he pulled the bill. The House sponsor tried to tweak the PIPA version enough to get it passed, but in an election year the votes weren’t there and the bill was pulled.
This week Rasmussen came out with a survey that revealed 71% of likely voters believed that government censorship is a bigger threat than illegal downloading even though 67% believed someone who downloads a movie online without paying for it is stealing. Mistrust, not morality, is the reason people don’t want the government involved in the Internet.
In the movie Shane, Alan Ladd’s character defends his gunfighter reputation by saying, “A gun is only as bad or as good as the man using it.” Likewise, technology can be used for good or bad. However, just because a relative few use it for bad doesn’t justify restricting and penalizing the many by making technology more onerous for the good to use. But that’s the government mindset. Because citizens were not alert to the machinations of Congress, all of us must now show identification in order to buy Sudafed, which once sold over-the-counter, simply because a few people bought it to melt down in a meth lab. All of us suffer the indignity of pat-downs or x-rays in airport security because two people boarded planes with devices in their Jockey shorts or shoe soles. A healthcare system that worked well in insuring 85% of the people was turned upside down to insure the other 15%, most of whom were only temporarily uninsured or chose to go without insurance. Means and ends are always inverted in government solutions. Americans deserve better than the dictum of Frederick the Great that it is better to let the innocent suffer than the guilty escape.
As I have said repeatedly in this blog, the greatest threat that Americans face in losing their liberty comes from their own government. The founders themselves recognized this when crafting the Constitution. In his book of political essays, Here the People Rule, author Edward Banfield laments that – perhaps inevitably – “[t]he ink was not yet dry on the Constitution when its revision began." Almost from its Constitutional inception, Congress began pushing the boundaries beyond the limited government the Framers thought they were giving the descendants of those who had lived under the tyranny of George III. “There is an antagonism,” Banfield says, “amounting to an incompatibility, between popular government … [i.e.] in accordance with the will of the people … and the maintenance of limits on the sphere of government.”
This week’s victory by the people for the people against the imperial overreach of the federal government was a temporary one. Chalk this one up to HTTP 404: Problem not found. But this won’t be the last time we’ll see something like SOPA/PIPA. The Morlock-like inhabitants inside the Washington beltway are inherently mistrustful of the Internet’s power because it is able to mobilize millions in moments as it did to kill this ill-conceived attempt to control more of our lives. Copyright infringement was a sideshow from the get-go. But don’t take my word for it. Read the bills for yourself – they’re online.
We should not underestimate the government’s frustration with a medium that can “go viral” with information and images in minutes, a medium that is not sympathetic with government ideology and is an alternative voice to that of the mainstream news, a medium that can quickly network experts to uncover a cover-up – as Dan Rather sadly learned – and confront politicians with evidence that contradicts their claims, a medium that has a memory which can recall and replay what politicians wish to be forgotten, a medium that is currently outside of government control.
We can be certain that those who seek to control a power that equals or exceeds theirs will not give up easily.
SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA stands for Protect Intellectual Property Act. The SOPA bill was birthed in the Senate and PIPA was a hatchling of the House, but the same wolf is wearing sheep’s overalls in both cases so just consider them two versions of the same Congressional bilge water.
Dare I ask who could possibly be against stopping online piracy or protecting intellectual property – except those who hate moms and are allergic to apple pie? Well, er, uhhh, me … and I love both mom and apple pie. Why my opposition? Because SOPA and PIPA are takeover attempts just as unconstitutional as the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (McCain-Feingold). Reform and protection weren’t the true purposes those two red herrings any more than gun control is about preventing criminal violence. People who break laws don’t think about law-breaking, only law-abiders do. And every time the airheads in Congress pass laws to prevent something, the law-abiders lose more freedom through compliance and the law-breakers are unconcerned and therefore unaffected.
Do I think there is piracy of Internet-based protected content? Sure I do. But the solution, if there is one (and there might not be), isn’t more laws. Here’s my argument. Judge for yourself.
For years Hollywood and the music industry have fought against the theft of their content. Relying on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) the industry of content producers and the industry of hosting websites have been self-governing and self-policing. Sites like YouTube and Facebook that receive notice under DMCA that their site is hosting pirated content are required to take down the content within a specific time period and, if they comply, there is no penalty. About 99.99% of the time, the system works well without a government nanny.
Without the help of SOPA or PIPA, a well-publicized instance of piracy was recently punished when Megaupload received an unannounced visit from the FBI. Arrests as far away as New Zealand resulted when copies of stolen movies and television shows were seized.
By way of background, some of us can recall the early days of the commercial Internet when content producers were so concerned about piracy and illegal downloading that they were reluctant to post their content online. Even before the Internet became of age, the record industry tried to prevent piracy by having CD burners on PCs outlawed and the motion picture industry tried to squash VHS recorders. Both were classic examples of mixing outcomes and methods into the same stew. Instead, saner minds prevailed and music and movie content can now be sold online through Netflix and iTunes in convenient and fairly priced transactions that are manifestly more civilized than some government meat axe solution could ever achieve.
Websites and e-commerce companies already operate under contractual agreements that assure copyrighted material isn’t posted. So when WikiLeaks tried to escape a hacker’s denial-of-service attacks on its old servers, it moved its content to Amazon.com servers but Amazon kicked them off. The reason was not to suppress free speech, as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights howled. It was because WikiLeaks wasn’t following the terms of service when it posted content it didn’t own or control, classified or otherwise – which strikes at the heart of the WikiLeaks business model. Then when WikiLeaks appealed to its supporters for donations to continue its operations, contributions around the world poured in through PayPal, the payment processor now owned by eBay. PayPal shut down the donation channel because it violated their "Acceptable Use Policy" which prohibits engaging in "activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity," which WikiLeaks clearly does by encouraging submittals of embarrassing stolen content. No SOPA or PIPA help was needed here.
As the Internet has matured and access has become more economical around the world, the problem of content piracy has grown and preventing it has become more complicated. Megaupload.com, for example, is based in Hong Kong but used servers in this country. Shutting down those servers was no problem. But how about content theft that is partly or exclusively located outside the boundaries of the US? Foreign-based content thieves don’t sit down with a US legal statute guidebook in their lap deciding how they can steal American content without breaking US law. No, they spend their energy devising methods that make terminating their operations harder. And they do it in a way so that getting “caught” is not a problem.
For example, illegally hosting content is soooooo “yesterday” because clever content thieves no longer host content. They host thousands, if not millions, of links to content residing on personal computers all over the world. Each of those personal computers hosts pirated films, music files, or software. This pirated content can be downloaded by anyone using special software, which in some cases causes that person’s personal computer to become a host in the network of links, perhaps without even knowing it. There is no legal basis for taking action against the primary link host because it doesn’t host any illegal content. Finding all of the computers in a distributed network is almost impossible.
Enter the powerful lobbyists for the content producers. They ask Congress, who are cyber-tards in this arena, to produce a law that protects their clients from these foreign content thieves. Thieves, of course, aren’t hindered by law, so this was a fool’s errand from the start. SOPA and PIPA are the result – bills written by Congressmen and their staffs who don’t know the difference between a hard drive and a diode. If SOPA/PIPA became law, it would give unprecedented power to Eric Holder’s DOJ to shut down any website with little provocation. For example, an entire website could be shut down if only a single user posts anything that a content producer alleges to be a violation – even something as absurd as a kid posting on YouTube her rendition of a copyrighted song or a person reading from a copyrighted book. Assume a bank robber sticks up a bank. Under SOPA/PIPA the DOJ can shut down the bank.
In effect, this would make every website, search engine, web hosting company, blogger – anyone who allows others to post on his site – responsible for what is posted. The web world would be turned into content cops, imposing an immeasurable liability cost on Internet companies.
And what if some government official didn’t like the political commentary coming from, say, AmericanThinker.com or PJMedia.com? With SOPA/PIPA as law, those and other sites could be shut down just as soon as there is a posted link to content at, for example, ABC News or CNN or the New York Times. If they claimed violations of their copyrights – and who hasn’t violated copyrights – the publishers of American Thinker and PJ Media could be charged and go to jail. Yep. Jail birds would be added to their resume.
Nawh, no one would ever take the law that far. Really? You mean like the TSA zombies who confiscated your nail clippers at the airport security gate? You mean like the lobotomized teacher in a government school (aka public school) who suspended an 8-year old for three days for pointing his finger at another kid imitating a pistol and made a “pow” sound – because the school was a “gun-free zone”? Power in the hands of government bureaucrats is guaranteed to result in an IQ equivalent to that of a Rhesus monkey.
Logically, one has to ask what economic loss occurs from piracy. The criminal who creates the content theft scheme wouldn’t have paid for it – law or no law. And the people who download pirated material knowing it is theft have already decided not to pay for it. I would argue that losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of a free and open Internet which fosters innovation and market reach. But a ham-fisted law that sets onerous penalties for web entrepreneurs and companies who can unintentionally violate it will have a chilling effect on Internet creativity and risk-taking. Rather than worrying about the lost revenue from content theft, it seems to me that content producers would be better served by devoting their energies to creating innovative methods to effectively expand their market so crime doesn’t pay – it isn’t worth the effort.
Steve Jobs showed how to do this when he created the iPod. Napster proved there was a large market for digital downloads although the only way to get digital music was to share files illegally. Jobs convinced recording artists that it was better to get some revenue than no revenue and worked out a revenue-sharing model if they would consent to allow digital downloads in the iTunes e-store. The first day that the iTunes store opened, there were a million downloads. Four months later, there were almost eight million daily downloads. Apple became the largest music retailer in the world. When digital music files became convenient and relatively cheap, theft became a hassle.
This is the point that the content producers are missing. A bad business model isn’t protected by law anymore than high tariffs protect domestic businesses from foreign competition. Tariffs shield businesses from being competitive and in the end they lose. Just look at the American steel industry which hid behind protective tariffs for decades as other world producers became increasingly efficient. Eventually, world producers were able to make a profit on a ton of steel at a price that wouldn’t allow American producers to recover their costs.
Anti-piracy laws produce the same outcome. The recording industry artists association could have come up with the solution that Jobs created, but it would have required a different business model than the one to which it was wedded. Their business model sold music in CD-based albums, forcing customers to buy music tracks that had no interest to them in order to get the one or two songs on the CD that they wanted. Jobs gave the market what it wanted with a business model that sold music by the song instead of the CD album.
Thankfully, within the last 60 days Internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia got wind of the government’s latest attempt to pull a fast one on them with their SOPA/PIPA Frankenstein. Internet companies and users quickly became activists when they learned how the government’s bill would interfere with the openness of the Internet. Last Wednesday, January 18, Wikipedia went “dark” for 24 hours to show what the Internet would be without it. The company posted a message encouraging people who hit their site to contact their Congressman and Senators. Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and over 10,000 websites followed suit, going “dark” in protest. An estimated 115,000 other websites posted online protests and petition forms. Google covered its logo, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg issued a comment on Twitter. Eight million Wikipedia users filed online petitions against the SOPA/PIPA bills. Seven million Google customers protested with Google’s form, three million tweets were sent and over a million telephone calls were made. There were so many incoming emails to the Capitol that inboxes were full and servers ran at full capacity.
Senators and Representatives got the message. Of those who had taken a position favoring the bills, most jumped ship. A majority of those who hadn’t taken a position lined up in opposition to SOPA/PIPA. When Senate Democrat Leader Reid saw he didn’t have the votes, he pulled the bill. The House sponsor tried to tweak the PIPA version enough to get it passed, but in an election year the votes weren’t there and the bill was pulled.
This week Rasmussen came out with a survey that revealed 71% of likely voters believed that government censorship is a bigger threat than illegal downloading even though 67% believed someone who downloads a movie online without paying for it is stealing. Mistrust, not morality, is the reason people don’t want the government involved in the Internet.
In the movie Shane, Alan Ladd’s character defends his gunfighter reputation by saying, “A gun is only as bad or as good as the man using it.” Likewise, technology can be used for good or bad. However, just because a relative few use it for bad doesn’t justify restricting and penalizing the many by making technology more onerous for the good to use. But that’s the government mindset. Because citizens were not alert to the machinations of Congress, all of us must now show identification in order to buy Sudafed, which once sold over-the-counter, simply because a few people bought it to melt down in a meth lab. All of us suffer the indignity of pat-downs or x-rays in airport security because two people boarded planes with devices in their Jockey shorts or shoe soles. A healthcare system that worked well in insuring 85% of the people was turned upside down to insure the other 15%, most of whom were only temporarily uninsured or chose to go without insurance. Means and ends are always inverted in government solutions. Americans deserve better than the dictum of Frederick the Great that it is better to let the innocent suffer than the guilty escape.
As I have said repeatedly in this blog, the greatest threat that Americans face in losing their liberty comes from their own government. The founders themselves recognized this when crafting the Constitution. In his book of political essays, Here the People Rule, author Edward Banfield laments that – perhaps inevitably – “[t]he ink was not yet dry on the Constitution when its revision began." Almost from its Constitutional inception, Congress began pushing the boundaries beyond the limited government the Framers thought they were giving the descendants of those who had lived under the tyranny of George III. “There is an antagonism,” Banfield says, “amounting to an incompatibility, between popular government … [i.e.] in accordance with the will of the people … and the maintenance of limits on the sphere of government.”
This week’s victory by the people for the people against the imperial overreach of the federal government was a temporary one. Chalk this one up to HTTP 404: Problem not found. But this won’t be the last time we’ll see something like SOPA/PIPA. The Morlock-like inhabitants inside the Washington beltway are inherently mistrustful of the Internet’s power because it is able to mobilize millions in moments as it did to kill this ill-conceived attempt to control more of our lives. Copyright infringement was a sideshow from the get-go. But don’t take my word for it. Read the bills for yourself – they’re online.
We should not underestimate the government’s frustration with a medium that can “go viral” with information and images in minutes, a medium that is not sympathetic with government ideology and is an alternative voice to that of the mainstream news, a medium that can quickly network experts to uncover a cover-up – as Dan Rather sadly learned – and confront politicians with evidence that contradicts their claims, a medium that has a memory which can recall and replay what politicians wish to be forgotten, a medium that is currently outside of government control.
We can be certain that those who seek to control a power that equals or exceeds theirs will not give up easily.
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