The 1 percent and their employees are masters of word play. They turned the estate tax into the "death tax," life-saving health and environmental rules became "job-killing" regulations, and of course when it comes to taxes, the richest of the rich are now "job creators" who are supposed to be exempt from paying taxes.
Given this track record, it is hardly surprising that a bill that would require every website in the country to become unpaid copyright enforcement officers for Time Warner, Disney, and the Washington Post comes packaged as the "Stop Online Piracy Act." While the name may lead the public to believe that Congress is trying to keep our email pure and our computer screens safe, the real story is that the 1 percent are again trying to rig the rules so that they get as many dollars as possible from the rest of us.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would place an enormous burden not just on Internet giants like Google and Facebook, but any website that allows people to post content or includes links to other sites. An owner of copyrighted material would be able to go the Justice Department and claim infringement and request that the whole site be taken down.
While sites are already required to remove material that is determined to be infringing under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the SOPA requires that sites in effect preemptively screen material for potential infringements. If they fail, they risk having their whole site taken down for a period of time, in addition to paying damages to copyright holders.
The question that serious people would ask is what problem is the SOPA intended to address? There is still plenty of money being made by online distributors of music, movies, books and software. The problem seen by the top executives at Disney and the other promoters of the SOPA is that they want to make more.
A substantial amount of copyright-protected material does slip through the system, as does an even larger amount of material with ambiguous copyright status such as a home-made video with parts of a copyrighted song or material whose copyright may have expired. The big entertainment companies want to impose large costs on web intermediaries (which will be passed on to consumers) and make it more difficult for people to gain access to totally open material, in order to make them pay more money for their copyright-protected material.
Although the SOPA strategy of reducing access while raising prices could fit the dictionary definition of "job-killing regulation," its advocates have the incredible audacity to be touting the 19 million jobs at stake. People really should take a moment to look at the industry's website to see what might well rank as the most outrageous misrepresentation of economic reality ever to appear in a Washington policy debate.
The basic story is that if an industry is in any way directly or indirectly dependent on the output of a copyright-protected industry, then the jobs in that industry will be put at risk if Congress doesn't approve the SOPA. By this methodology, all the jobs in the shipping industry will be at risk if we end the tax credit for solar power, since some of the materials used in solar panels is imported. This is patently absurd, but if you work for the 1 percent, you can get such arguments taken seriously in Washington policy circles.
In reality, the higher costs that the SOPA will impose on consumers both directly, and indirectly by raising costs to intermediaries, are money out of their pocket. The additional money that will be collected by the entertainment industry is money that will not be spent in local stores or restaurants.
It's true that some of the money earned by entertainment industry will get back to writers, musicians and other creative workers, but this will be a very small amount compared with the additional cost to consumers. If we had forward thinking politicians in Washington, or economists who didn't sell their services to the highest bidder, policy would be focused on devising more efficient mechanisms for supporting creative work.
Copyright is an incredibly inefficient mechanism dating back from the 16th century. The costs of enforcement are soaring as the Internet makes it ever more difficult. This is a situation where we are relying on toll booths to pay for our roads, but it is becoming ever easier for travelers to evade the toll booths. Rather looking for alternative ways to finance road construction, we are building bigger more expensive toll booths and increasing the penalties for not paying tolls.
Of course the point is to have money going to the road builders, not the people who run toll booths. There are alternative mechanisms for financing creative work. There is already a vast amount of creative and intellectual work that is not supported by copyrights. This includes work done by university faculty, work supported by non-profit organizations, and even to some extent work supported by the government.
We should be looking to expand and improve these alternative mechanisms rather than turn cyberspace into a copyright protected police state. The SOPA is big government at its worst: an intrusion into the market to help the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else.
Follow Dean Baker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DeanBaker13
Edward J. Black: Grateful for the Internet and Those Saving It
Susan Landau: Hollywood and the Internet: Time for the Sequel
Patrick Ruffini: Stop #SOPA: Using the Internet to Save the Internet
Google exec: Online piracy bills in Congress wrong - Technology ...
Google exec: Online piracy bills in Congress wrong - Yahoo! News
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Online piracy bills in Congress wrong: Google exec - Economic Times
I heard that someone copyrighted 'Happy Birthday' and it is illegal to sing or play the song.
That clarified that the government and big business have to have law 'enforcement' to get by with what they do. It has gradually gotten worse and worse until we have no rights.
The democracy we have in this country wouldn't work here if it wasn't for law enforcement.
The rich don't go to jail unless they want to jail Martha Stewart while they let bigger crimes go unpunished.
Here's part of the new landscape: the proposed legislation means that you can't post your wedding photos from 10 years ago without paying the photographer for that right - not included with the prints you originally ordered - remember, the negatives belong to the photographer, and the new regulations will allow your IP to shut down your entire family website if the photographer complains. Some proposed legislation takes it further and says that anything you put on the internet must have a copyright owner and permission to use it must be obtained - if not, the item cannot be put on the internet... so much for using that photo of your kid that your ex-neighbor took a couple of years ago.
To quote John Dvorak:
The movie and music industries are good at sucking up as much money as possible while crying poverty about losses from piracy and writers' strikes.
This article is really wrong on so many levels, and I hope people do a little more research on the topic.
As the copyright owner of over thirty books, I won't be able to go to anyone and demand a site be taken down.
I'm not trying to rig anything. I just don't want to be stolen from - where is the harm in that? You would lock your doors, right? If a burglar broke in, wouldn't you want someone to stop them? Or try to get your stuff back? Or prevent it from happening again.
Rigged? Please. That's as silly as believing I'm a 1%er.
There are better ways to protect you and your work - don't be herded.
It's convenient to paint this as Big Hollywood versus the little guy BUT nothing could be further from the truth. Do you consider Google to be part of the 99%. Google earned more than 2.5 BILLION last quarter from its online advertising. Guess what? A good portion of that revenue comes from ads on sites that feature pirated/stolen/counterfeit content.
The fact that Google got their hand slapped with a $500 million fine by the feds for placing ads on illegal pharmacy sites should give you a clue.
It's open season on artists online and something must be done. SOPA can be refined and reworked to address any legit concerns, but the rampant theft that protects those who steal (and profit) at the expense of those who work for a living creating content (at every level) must be stopped.
It's not about protecting people from counterfeit or dangerous products, or about ensuring that artists and authors get paid, as some of the more naive would like to believe.
Like the music industry that paid 10 cents to artists for a 20 dollar CD, they have grown accustomed to ripping off both artists and the public.
I would pay for a movie if it was easily available at a decent price. Of course, they don't release them to netflix or Amazon, they don't provide them on the internet, they don't even release the DVD till they've milked the theater crowd, then the hotel crowd. And they wonder why there's piracy?
It then requires multiple (likely expensive) legal steps to reinstate services, and places the burden of proof that they're NOT infringing on the accused site itself - not on the accuser! That undermines one of the most fundamental concepts of our entire legal system.
Based on the proposed model, a large company could simply file repeated claims to force small competitors into bankruptcy by tying them up in court and choking off all sources of funds. Even false claims, which the accuser would have to pay for, might be enough to shut down a small business, and totally worth the cost for the already-giant content providers that can afford the legal fees.
In Florida alone, 90,000 people would lose access to safe, affordable prescription medications because of SOPA. These Americans cannot afford the exorbitant prescription costs in the United States, and need the life-saving, safe and affordable option of drug importation.
RxRights is a national coalition of individuals and organizations dedicated to promoting and protecting American consumer access to sources of safe, affordable prescription drugs. The Coalition is asking consumers to take action now by sending letters to Capitol Hill and the White House encouraging them to oppose this legislation in its current form. For more information or to voice your concern, visit www.RxRights.org.
I own, produce and distribute adult films. Oftentimes those films show up online BEFORE I am finished releasing the film on DVD to my mail order and retail customers undermining the value of the film. I understand piracy happens. What I don't understand is that frequently the pirate sites make their money by getting eyeballs by stealing content and then selling adspace to Google or whoever for those eyeballs.
I absolutely think the internent should be regulated and controlled. If I had my way there would be NO adult or violent content on the internet. But IF it is going to be there and IF it is my property being stolen then yes, I want the government to enfrorce my ownership. I am tired of having to write letters to webmasters asking them to please take down my stolen content. Usually they do. Of course, they have already made money and lowered the value of my content by that time but nobody seems to care about that.
Just to be clear: I am all for censoring adult and violent content from the internet. I am all for punishing ANY company that profits by stealing the work of other people. And there are already "fair use" provisions in copyright law so YouTube wouldn't have that much trouble. Duh.