SOPA Opera

Should the Senate bill called PIPA or the House version called SOPA emerge as the law of the land (and probably a few other lands as well) odds are you won't like it, whether you're a downloader of music or a blogger who may have borrowed a photo you found on Google or elsewhere or a user of Wikipedia or even someone who clips an article and sends it to a friend. Neither bill is there to address the concerns of the public, but rather the (you guessed it) big corporations hell bent on retaining every last crumb, every last cent of potential profit from every word or image or sound they can claim as their own in perpetuity.

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.

Gagging the Web

What's a COICA? Not an anatomical term, but yet another government sponsored acronym for the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. According to some, it's needed to protect intellectual property, a term which often provokes cynicism regarding the intellectual properties of some intellectual property, but I'll save that for another post.

According to others, like Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, quoted in Raw Story this morning as saying it's

"almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb, when what you need is a precision-guided missile."

As I read it, if any state AG finds something you wrote last year was insufficiently attributed or a thought or picture that belonged to someone else -- you're off the air along with everything else you've written. Is it just me, or does that sound as if it had been designed for misuse? Will any website critical of government or government officials or members of the same party as a State Attorney General be sifted for some infraction that can justify it's obliteration or postpone publication indefinitely? Is this bill far too broad to be safe? Were we all born yesterday?

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed this bit of poorly digested legislation yesterday. (there's a metaphor here, look for it) It was passed unanimously and yet it won't be hanging over the heads of bloggers like some bloody sword just yet and we owe it to Wyden who used his Senatorial option to place holds on pending legislation to force proponents to re-introduce the bill in the next session. I hope that by then the opposition will have made its case and shed enough light on the potential for politically based government censorship.

Don Wyden is a Democrat, but Democrats should perhaps avoid crowing about being the defenders of freedom of the press since the bill was co-sponsored by Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, who described it as a bipartisan effort to protect property rights. Obviously there's no lack of support for putting such things above freedom of speech by Democratic Senators.

A group calling itself Demand Progress is circulating a petition they hope will make a difference, and now that we have a brief reprieve, perhaps it will. Perhaps you will agree.

Internet Freedom Act and Net Neutrality

No, no, no. The Internet Freedom Act isn't about freedom for you as an internet user and you should know by now that when a Republican uses the word Freedom it's about corporate control over your options. John McCain's "freedom act" appears now, after we've just begun to recover from eight years of the Bush FCC acting as a wholly owned subsidiary of big communications corporations; fudging the science and ignoring its own rules with impunity. Under Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, the Commission has stifled, hidden and falsified studies concerning the adverse effects on the public airwaves and even disaster relief services, of using power lines as a conductor for broadband internet and has made censorship of "indecency" a prime directive. It's high time they were prevented from protecting the public interest rather than the power of the telecommunications industry and the religious right.

If McCain's legislation is passed, the Internet Service Providers will have the power to limit your web bandwidth and mine and give preference to - you guessed it - the people they like, the people they own and the people who say what they want said. Have a blog that criticizes Comcast? Back to the days of 300 baud for you old chap! Fox News can blaze along at any speed they like with all the streaming and screaming video and Glennbeckery they can produce and the FCC won't be able to represent you. The freedom of giant corporations and puritanical moralists to censor you -- that's the kind of freedom John McCain thinks is worth fighting for!