In the middle of one of the most contentious debates in Congress about intellectual property in recent memory, the MPAA appears to have finally found an analogy that it believes will persuade skeptics to support slash-and-burn piracy bills now before Congress: Google in China.
On Thursday, Variety published an interview with MPAA chairman Chris Dodd, in which the former senator directly (and apparently favorably) compared the Internet filtering contemplated in two controversial U.S. anti-piracy bills to Chinese Internet censorship. Singling out Google's opposition to the bills, Dodd said, "When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn't do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites." Really?
I want to give Dodd the benefit of the doubt, but it is hard to find a benign headline for his remarks. How about "MPAA to Google: 'You did it for China; now do it for Hollywood'"? Or "MPAA to Congress: 'If it's good enough for China, it should be good enough for the United States'"? This awkward moment of candor helps reveal the two bills -- PROTECT IP in the Senate and SOPA in the House -- for what they are. Far from being narrow efforts to take action against the worst of the worst infringers, they are an attempt to dramatically change U.S. Internet policy from a system that punishes illegal actors but favors openness, innovation, and free expression to a closed system that prefers distributed methods of control in the service of powerful interests. Such a shift would be devastating to the U.S. Internet industry and to free expression. Dodd seems to have forgotten the last chapter in the Google in China saga. Google eventually pulled out of China because of its filtering and blocking mandates and now redirects some of google.cn traffic to the uncensored google.com.hk.
Thankfully, a bipartisan group of senators and representatives have put another option on the table -- one that takes more careful aim at the real bad guys and adopts a follow-the-money approach to cutting off so-called "rogue" sites. There are a lot of new ideas in the bill that bear careful discussion, but one thing is clear: thoughtful legislators can find sensible ways to address piracy without following the lead of one of the world's most Internet-repressive countries.
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Dean Baker: The Stop Online Piracy Act: Class War in Cyberspace
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
Piracy will go on anyway Everything that can be seen or heard can be copied. No? It is more than insane to think otherwise.
The corporations asking for Congress to ruin the Internet are witless themselves. It is a new world and the cash flow and business models of the past are now history.
Think oral storytellers and the printing press. No way to salvage the old business model there. Think live music and recording, nope no way to salvage that either. Now it is recorded music's turn. Think stage plays and movies no way to save the stage as dominant.
I like storytelling and live music and stage plays but they are not dominant and no act of congress could make them so. Could it? Huh? Honestly?
Chris Dodo and his like are on the take from dying industries that would rather wreck the future than accept that there is not so much money in their line of work anymore.
The Internet is a miracle exactly because you can copy stuff. It is the miracle of the loaves and fishes where Jesus fed the multitudes with a few fish and loaves of bread. So Chis and company are like the Roman bureaucrats and soldiers eager to stop the miracle to preserve the status quo.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chinese-counterfeit-parts-found-in-us-weapons/2011/11/07/gIQAQGh7wM_story.html
Parts and products from China used to be just both cheap and inexpensive - now they're counterfeit as well.
This isn't capitalism, it isn't even business - it's state-supported industrial terrorism.
The recording industries (in their various incarnations) should seriously stop and think about just how much free advertising they're getting from product that it costs them next-to-nothing now to distribute. They should also pause to consider how much product they're transmitting out into the ether for anyone to pick up if they choose to. In other words: (a) how much does it actually cost you to carry out your business TODAY?, and (b) how much are you actually benefiting right now from this status quo that now you seek so earnestly to destroy?
What I'm saying is: "don't kill the goose that's laying the golden eggs for you."
Most of the "the sky is falling!!" arguments boil down to some theoretical measure of "how much money we could be making," which (when compared to the very tidy but nevertheless somewhat smaller sum that you ARE now making) can be trumped-up e.g. to Congress as "some incredible loss." The fallacy (and it is a huge one...) comes from not considering the true consequences of expecting your customers to live under these new rules you want to impose.
Buying .. anything, everything .. is always a voluntary decision. Don't screw it up.
China does not have a sex addiction epidemic.
China does not have a .XXX domain either.
China does not have a population 70% infected with incurable STD (according to the CDC - HPV virus causes cancer, and of course genital herpes).
Sex crimes in China are 1/10th that in the U.S. on a per capita basis.
Mayhap there IS something to learn.