In my opinion, it's gone far past any position I could call reasonable. I've given many a guffaw when nearly every image one could call art has to be blurred out when shown on television and although I'm sure an effort will be made to blame yet another corporate triumph on "the Liberals" and of course "that Obama" this "intellectual property" and "artist's rights" crusade is a trend that started twenty years ago or more. There's always a noble purpose, of course -- like protecting the interests of widows and orphans of dead artists and writers and such noble purpose often devolves into huge lawsuits like the squabble between France and Spain as to which one can be the executor of the Salvador Dali estate in the absence of any widows or offspring. I remember the difficulty of using an image of a work of art to sell it because whoever owned the rights to a long dead artist's work might sue you even though your efforts were actually supporting the price of the commodity. It's nearly always about money and lawyers, no matter what it's dressed up as.
But my disdain for monster corporations stomping all over Congress screaming "mine, mine, mine" isn't my main concern. I'm more worried about the enforcement, which seems to allow huge fines for downloading some two and a half minutes of some Cramps tune from the early 90's or, God forbid, a little night music by Mozart, but about the next increment of surveillance and the possibility of making the Internet a very, very inhospitable place for non-corporate bloggers and providers of information like Wikipedia. While people of all political persuasions dislike the idea of Big Brother watching us, perhaps too few are watching Big Brother, Inc.
People often learn from mistakes, but it seems corporations do not. Prohibition and the war on drugs and stringent gun control and the war on pornography have hurt far more than they have helped and they haven't helped very much. Draconian penalties don't reduce crime and as a great article at Bloomberg.com today points out this morning, this War on Piracy isn't likely to stop, slow down or to have any effect.
"SOPA and PIPA are just the next steps in this larger enforcement agenda. Whatever happens to them, online enforcement will remain a very slippery slope, with attendant risks of censorship, surveillance, and the loss of due process. Because nothing in SOPA or PIPA is likely to stop piracy, there will be strong pressure to keep sliding."
Individuals will be scapegoated and ruined, lawyers will buy gaudier cars and cuff links and the free flow of information we have learned to rely on will dry up while more and more ordinary citizens will be made into criminals. The inevitable failure of this new, expensive enforcement crusade will only be used as proof that we need more of it, if history is a reliable teacher, and the true danger here is that it will, and I'm certain of it, be another stepping stone to the corporate police state. These are measures the public by in large does not support, but of course the public is distracted at the moment by the Republican freak show and revival meeting -- and of course congress listens to the representatives of industry instead of representing us.
I'm old enough to remember the movie industry's attempts to block cable TV and video recorders. I'm not old enough to remember how the advent of phonograph records and later radio broadcasting would, so they said, demolish the music industry, but I do remember the push to add a tax onto VCRs to reimburse the movie studios God given right to profit. I do remember how the music industry effectively prevented Americans from owning Digital Audio Tape machines and I remember how FedEx and others insisted in adding a tax on Fax machines to stifle competition and I remember how all these things not only failed but also how in the long run some of this technology was a huge boon to industries that were terrified of them.
Face it, the Internet is terrifying to a lot of entities, many of whom don't have anything like the public interest in mind when they propose to bend it to their will or destroy it. This thing of ours has more potential for good than the printing press and the spectacle of corporations crying about too much regulation calling for the garroting of that good in the name of a guaranteed right to a profit is as disgusting as anything prompting my gag reflex these days.
Another example of corporation/government collusion in the march to restrict individual liberties.
ReplyDeleteWe the people must be herded into the government/corporate corral and fed the prescribed articles of conformance.
Capt.,
ReplyDeleteThanks for this timely post. This is a subject of interest to anyone who uses the system of tubes, cups & strings known as the Internet. I saw a hilarious segment of the Rachel Maddow show recently in which some of the very legislators who were loudly in favor of SOPA were demonstrated to have infringed on some poor devil’s copyright by lifting images and posting them to an official web page. The fumbducks have no idea what they’re doing and even less idea what they’re supporting—if indeed they care, so long as somebody is sticking money in their campaign-pockets to support it. As I understand it, the legislation we’re talking about here is basically domestic terrorism against the public, or it could lead to such a chilling state of affairs if strictly enforced. Who would bother surfing the net if simply copying and pasting an image, or downloading a music file for purely private listening, or quoting a short string of text, would bring down a ridiculous fine or threaten a prison sentence?
Go ahead, you dumb, greedy SOBs, just make everything tens of millions of people do on the Net illegal and punishable by a hundred years in the pen. That will be really profitable. Perhaps the prospect of having anything to do with cultural artifacts or experience online will only bring a chill to those considering it, and they’ll stick to staring at the wall instead. Much safer, you see.
I agree that copyright holders deserve some protection, but big corporate entities have no business threatening to shut down or severely censor the Internet to protect their profits. They need to find creative and constructive ways to protect legitimate interests, and at the same time, Net citizens need to understand that not all intellectual production is going to be absolutely free.
What might help somewhat is a better definition of “fair use” because the one we now have doesn’t seem particularly clear and a lot of people find it frustrating to deal with. I don’t think we can get such a sloppy doctrine whittled down to perfection, but we should be able to do better than we are doing at present. But not if the Republicans are in charge of refining the definition -- I suspect they'd just use it as a tool for the corporate interests that fund their drive to stay in office.
Excellent. Nothing to add.
ReplyDeleteY'all do realize that there are corporations on both sides of this fight? AOL, Facebook, iTunes, YouTube, Wikipedia are all corporate for profit entities who have convinced the public that this battle is all about censorship by the big bad government. They demonstrated their power yesterday by going dark. People who needed access to these Internet services to earn a living were just S.O.L. Seems that MPAA and RIAA aren't the only corporate entities that like to throw their weight around.
ReplyDeleteAs the White House has recognized, SOPA and PIPA reach too far and enforcement would create a nightmare, but that doesn't mean that nothing needs to be done. I repeat, SOPA and PIPA are bad bills. I want to be clear on this so that there is no focus on the belief that I am defending these particular pieces of legislation.
Most information eventually enters the public domain; copyrights expire. Depending on the extent and type of copyright, they can be renewed. copyright protection info
If I write and publish a book, and it's available on the Internet, without my authorization, then chances are that not very many people are going to actually purchase a copy. Piracy is theft. If you steal my purse, you are prosecuted. Steal my intellectual property, and you need to be prosecuted.
Just because the proposed legislation is unwieldy and way too broad does not mean that any regulation of the Internet with regards to the use of copyrighted works will destroy the Internet.
The sky will not fall. There is a need for developing an intelligent approach to preventing the latest CD by Susan Boyle from showing up for free downloads on the Internet before it even hits the stores. A real world business that secured copies of that CD and sold them for profit would face serious criminal charges, why shouldn't an Internet company? If you buy stolen goods on the street, you face charges for the receipt of stolen goods.
There is a rational position between the extremes and that is what we need to find Seldom is anything as black and white as we like to think. It's sort of like the ambivalence about lawyers. Everyone's a critic of the profession until they need representation. By the way, at least half of the lawyers in this country work for nonprofit agencies, are community organizers, work for legal aid and do a large amount of pro bono work annually. I know a lot of lawyers like that. I also know lawyers who work for huge firms and make megabucks who are always ready to take my call when I need assistance in their specialty area for a pro bono client. Five years ago the NC Bar Association (unaffiliated with the State Bar) created a program called Justice 4All. There is an annual event in which volunteer lawyers man the telephones in two hour shifts for a period of 12 hours. The clinics are set up at locations across the state. Anyone may call and get legal advice. If they actually need representation, via our lawyer referral service they are paired with an attorney who will work on a sliding fee scale based on the person's ability to pay. At the end of the day, some of the lawyers do drive off in gaudy cars, although most drive off in SUVs to pick up their kids.
Sheria,
ReplyDeleteI don't think folks are saying nothing at all needs to be done. I myself have noticed that some people seem to think that if it's on the Net (or if it can be placed on the Net), it should be free. That's unsustainable as a model for intellectual and artistic production -- we know that it's nice to think artists make art and critics criticize "because they must," but the truth is that most of them need to make a living. So if they write a book or do some art, etc., they should be able to make good money from it, not see it plastered everywhere gratis without so much as a "pretty please" exchanged.
That said, the drive towards "doing something" sure doesn't seem to be about the little guy or gal's art or literature or whatever -- it just seems like the same old congloms deciding that they ought to have a stranglehold on everything that happens to, with, and on a given medium. It's a difficult issue, I agree -- one doesn't want to allow a chill to descend over the Internet, but determined and sustained piracy is unethical and inexcusable, too.
It would be great if the legislators responsible for making changes actually understood something about the medium they're dealing with, but it's painfully clear that many of them know less -- far, far less -- than the general public.
A thought – this intellectual property issue is a huge one and very much in flux. What’s in transition is the very notion of intellectual and cultural authority, and the production and perpetuation thereof – this is one of the functions of culture: determining what’s worthwhile, worth promoting and believing and considering, and what is not.
ReplyDeleteThe barriers to intellectual production and distribution are scarcely PHYSICAL in this Internet age. Anyone with a connection can put material online. What’s still in flux in transition is the IDEOLOGICAL barriers to cultural production. I think this is why big recording companies, publishers, etc. feel threatened by new developments in electronic media. If another model of determining literary and other value should come into general favor, that model might not have anything to do with said companies – it might render them irrelevant. That’s hardly certain, but it’s by no means out of the question.
Sheria,
ReplyDeleteThere's no need to defend the legal profession here, and no need to think I'm defending piracy, but as with so many of our laws, the need for them stems from reducing things to the abstract so that they can be sold "on principal" while ignoring the actuality and hiding the ulterior motive.
I think that actuality includes million dollar lawsuits against kids trying to share some tune and bloggers quoting some article to critique it. People have been ruined by frivolous suits and I think this makes it easier for powerful corporations to protect their power by victimizing and terrorizing the public. I recall a friend of mine being threatened with a huge suit because his letterhead contained the letter M and he called himself McNutt. It was a stock font.
I recall, back in the 1990's, being sued by a rather famous artist and a client to whom I had sold a painting who was, at the time, denying authorship of any painting upon which he did not receive a kickback. There was a move at the time, protecting the widows and orphans, and all that, to write such "artist's rights" into law. Fortunately I was able to prove he was lying and his lawyer was later disbarred for various similar improprieties resembling extortion.
I see these proposed laws as serving primarily to protect the ever growing power of corporations and the government they own over the civil liberties of individuals -- and being dressed up with fine rhetoric to look civilized. I think many of the suits that would ensue would unfairly ruin all sorts of people who cannot afford to go to court with Disney. This isn't about stealing books or images from struggling authors or starving artists or the rest of the cast of La Boheme or peddling pirate CDs on a street corner and I think we already have laws against such things. It's about some 14 year old who makes a copy of something he bought for 99 cents, some kid who puts a picture of Justin Bieber on his blog. It's about the Olympic Cafe in Savanna Georgia being sued successfully for using the name "olympic." It's about the government being used as thugs and goons for the corporate bosses.
I think these bills are drafted, not by people who represent us, but by corporations in the interest of enhancing and protecting themselves against new technology that makes them less relevant -- just like the film studios trying to keep us from having cable TV and Video recorders.
Power always finds good reasons to protect itself, and the more so as that power grows. Power always keeps its conscience clear by telling us it has no choice, as the Grand Inquisitor told us in The Brothers Karamazov but I think we have a case of the need to do something fathering something as bad or worse than what it pretends to cure -- the right to a profit sanctifying yet another inquisition, another Prohibition, another war that can't be won this way -- a war like all the other doomed and destructive wars we've wasted our freedom on.
Selling e-books for 9 bucks, selling tunes for 99 cents on line -- these things diminish "piracy" dramatically and in fact make it easier for small writers and musicians to be heard, just like the VCR made more money for the film studios then they ever dreamed of and gave new life to old movies. Hell, would any of us be heard without the internet? Will any of us continue to be heard with Big brother Inc. watching us and threatening us with hundred thousand dollar fines for quoting Newt at too much length?