Earlier
today (Feb. 6), a most extraordinary group of people sent a letter to Capitol Hill, in
the latest round of the fight over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the
Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), telling Congress it was time to
reject the well-worn lobbying of the big media companies.
More
than 70 grassroots activist organizations and emerging Internet companies got
up the nerve to show Congress that it was time to stop fooling around with
bills that helped to generate the largest online protest in recent memory. More than 100,000 Web sites
participated in the Jan. 18 blackout day.
Tens of thousands of people called and visited their Congressional representatives,
all with one message: These bills are dangerous, and shouldn't be allowed to
proceed.
The letter, coordinated by Public Knowledge, said, "Now is
the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from
a fresh perspective."
The message that there were, and are, fundamental concerns
coming from a wide and comprehensive communities is one that doesn't come
across in comments that big executives have made lately. It's a shame that
Hollywood moguldom didn't get that message and instead is still playing make
believe. Lawmakers should realize
that their constituency in Hollywood is lacking a grasp of reality and missing
the mark by a mile.
One hand, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was quoted by
deadline.com as saying at a conference that Hollywood didn't lose the SOPA/PIPA
fight on the merits of their case.
It was, instead, because there was "a lot of misinformation" from
Silicon Valley. He blamed the "mob
mentality" and "unfortunate rhetoric" for the bills' troubles.
Speaking at the same All Things D conference, Chase Carey,
the number-two exec at Fox, said it was "the message getting twisted" by that
nasty Interweb that caused the bills to go down. Carey admitted he hadn't read the bills, but rejected
working with Silicon Valley on a solution. That's fine. It
really isn't Silicon Valley's place to work out a solution with Hollywood
anyway.
It boggles the mind that Hollywood, which exists to tell
stories, thinks it has let its story get away.
Let's define the issue in a way Hollywood would understand,
with this adaptation and then quotation from A Few Good Men:
Int. THE COURTROOM
We are in a courtroom, in a tense moment of a trial. It's a court-martial, and the
participants are all in the military. At the prosecution table is Navy LIEUTENANT
JUNIOR GRADE DANIEL ALLISTAIR KAFFEE (Tom Cruise in the movie), who has been
performing unevenly throughout the trial, but now is gaining confidence. He's questioning COLONEL NATHAN R. JESSEP (Jack Nicholson), a decorated Marine commander who looks down on KAFFEE as if he's an inferior life form. Back and forth they go, with KAFFEE asking and JESSEP grudgingly answering, until this, from the movie (as opposed to the play from which the movie was taken):
That's it in a nutshell, isn't it? Hollywood can't handle the truth about SOPA and PIPA.
First, they can't handle that there were dangerous elements to the bills. That was why so many people, the very people Congress left out of the discussion, were moved to get
involved. The bills were much more complex than "cracking down on overseas pirates," and yet those pushing the bills either disregarded or didn't recognize the threats to a free
Internet. Certainly their testimony before Congress didn't give any indication that they did either. When anyone brought up their objections, Hollywood executives and their legislative allies dismissed them. Who cared what cybersecurity analysts, law professors, artists, human rights groups, public-interest organizations and others had to say? Eventually the sponsors caved on the security issue, but only after a long-standing dispute.
Unlike the moguls, the activist letter recognized: "A wide
variety of important concerns have been expressed -- including views from
technologists, law professors, international human rights groups, venture
capitalists, entrepreneurs, and above all, individual Internet users. The
concerns are too fundamental and too numerous to be fully addressed through
hasty revisions to these bills. Nor can they be addressed by closed door
negotiations among a small set of inside-the-beltway stakeholders."
Second, the executives didn't recognize that the protest
against the bills was not a product of classic special-interest lobbying. It was not Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley. As this article in
PC World (and other publications) showed, Google did not create the protest against
the intellectual property bills.
Rather a network of groups with substantive concerns worked with
organizations from around the country, which, once informed of the dangers of
the bills, spread the word to their members, and constituent organizations.
Third, there really is some question about what "the
truth" is in these cases. The only numbers for "harm" come from the industry and haven't been duplicated by anyone. It's time to find out what the "harm" really is.
That time-out is necessary to "determine the true extent of online infringement and, as importantly, the economic effects of that activity, from accurate and unbiased sources, and weigh them against the economic and social costs of new copyright legislation. Congress cannot simply accept industry estimates regarding economic and job implications of infringement given the
Government Accountability Office's clear finding in 2010 that previous statistics and quantitative studies on the subject have been unreliable."
This is too important to hand over law making to one industry, as Congress did in the case of these bills. Too much is at stake to try to rework the bills in a slapdash manner, behind closed doors. That's the truth.