SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and the Changing Nature of Intellectual Property Rights

Earlier this week the House of Representatives and Senate of the United States postponed their votes on the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act respectively.  This is largely attributed to the amount of people who took issue with the bill, manifesting themselves in the form of internet petitions and protests in Washington.

Protractors of the bill espouse it as a way to combat internet piracy of copyrighted works.  It's no secret that it is now easier than ever to get music, movies, and books on the internet quickly and without paying.  The bills would require search engines to divert users from viewing websites flagged as pirate havens.  It would also allow the government to monitor and prosecute sites that have numerous complaints from intellectual property holders as infringing on their right to profit from their work.

Detractors of the bill claim that it, like the Patriot Act before it, contains language that is too broad and, therefore, easy to exploit.  Even the smallest provocation of someone who believes their rights are being circumvented would give the government free reign to shut an entire site down.  In short, the bill would make it too easy for the government to censor websites that it or anyone else finds even the slightest bit objectionable.

Really, it's perfectly reasonable for people who spend hours and hours working on an album, movie, or book as well as those who produce and distribute said works to want to be compensated by the people who benefit from experiencing them.  It's also perfectly reasonable to worry that the government would use legislation to gain sweeping, inappropriate powers to enforce social agendas.

Before I tell you what I think, I want to look around at your desk.  Bet you have a flash drive or some other kind of USB drive device lying around.  Take at a good look at it because that is the format of the modern world.  It's not the format of the future.  It's the format of now, of this world.  To understand the conflict of SOPA and legislation of its ilk, one must understand how art will be transferred and spread both now and in the near future.

Paper bound books will disappear within the next decade or so.  What's that, too hasty, you say?  If anything it's not hasty enough.  A digital copy of a book can be produced for next to nothing and copied for even less, as opposed to printing books which costs hundreds of amounts of additional time, resources, energy, space, and money.  The same goes for music and film. Furthermore, you can store a whole library's worth of novels, thousands of songs, and hundreds of hours video on a device about the size of your thumb.

This can hold a thousand copies of War and Peace, or hundreds of copies of all the Beatles albums before Rubber Soul, or all of Ed Wood's movies.  You know,.. if you're into that.

 Why would you waste so much time and energy on producing hard copies of things, when it's so much more economical to convert your products to digital format then produce and distribute them for next to nothing?  You wouldn't.  This ease of transfer is also the reason that it's so easy to get entertainment without paying.  Anyone can upload a file and send it to whoever wants it.  No need to waste your time going to the store or dealing with the producers.  It's all there at the click of button.  Like a lot of things in human behavior, the old ways of distributing artistic works are being felled by the all powerful forces of incentive.  

This march towards digitalization has been happening for a long time.  More importantly, it won't slow down, a point which leads me to the SOPA and PIPA bills.  The question should not be whether the government should do more to enforce copyright, or how we can reconcile the digital format with long-established property rules.  File-sharing is so easy, and in many ways it dominates the spread of entertainment, from bit-torrenting to youtube.  This is such a massive change from the way it was before, that it will eventually reach a point that traditional publishing and production will lose their monopolies on their respective industries and become one of many equally viable paths for artists to release their work.  You see stirrings of this already in the literary world, where you have large numbers of authors who never print a single book, opting instead to publish all of their work electronically online, sometimes for free (though admittedly not very often).  

The question that should be being asked is how can artists and their benefactors adapt to modern trends in such a way that they can still make a living because, quite frankly, if a work gets published, it will be file shared.  It's too easy; it’s impossible to avoid.

Unfortunately, governments aren't thinking in this way and neither are large industries that back bills like SOPA and PIPA.  What's even more frightening is that it's apparent that government isn't about to wait for legislative justification in an effort to enforce copyright.  Even after the delay of the SOPA and PIPA voting, the government went ahead and seized megaupload.com, one of the larger file-sharing hubs on the internet.  As usual, the government will handle things like it usually handles things.

FUCK IT!  WE'LL DO IT LIVE!

Nathan sure seems to be talking a lot about the States in his French blog.  Well, this isn't a problem limited to US (see what I did there).  The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Act is a multinational treaty signed on the first of October, 2011 by eight nations, including the US and Canada.  The EU is expected to sign the act in the near future.  It is similar in structure to SOPA and PIPA and would grant similar powers to participating governments, including broad sweeping powers to monitor and prosecute sites that they find suspicious.   The act also tries to address the proliferation of bootleg, generic medicine that go around pharmaceutical companies' patents.  The bill would create an ACTA committee that can operate independently from the participating nations, the UN, and the WTO without being subject to judicial review.

I think that these sorts of efforts are a waste of time.  Even if you make the argument that artists are suffering and having their work stolen, an argument that I think you most certainly can make, they give too much sweeping power to government entities and corporate supporters to arbitrarily infringe on privacy and dole out punishments.   I look at this legislation, and I can’t help but be reminded of the screaming fiasco that is the American war on drugs, an operation that has cost millions of dollars in resources, created unnecessarily harsh punishments for code-breakers, and has done absolutely nothing to stem the tide of drug use.  Sure, drug addiction is bad.  But people get high, and they are going to continue to get high regardless of how much effort short-sighted legislation tries to stop it.  

I felt this subject was appropriate for this blog because it's an international effort.  Remember those problems that I speculated about in one of my earlier posts about globalism.  This is one of those problems, roaming bands of nebulous security forces with multinational resources who answer to no one.  Sorry, as someone who hopes to get something published someday, I don't need an Orwellian police-force to make sure that my benefactors and I get paid.