SOPA – The slippery slope?
The Stop Online Piracy Act SOPA and its senate companion Protect IP Act PIPA are causing all sorts of bother on the internet today with sites such as Wikipaedia closing down in protest.
Superficially, this is about Silicon Valley disrupting the media industry. We’ve seen the effect of downloads on the music industry and the Film and Television industries don’t want any repeat of that scenario thank you very much!
The case of the start up band who have to pay for their rehearsal space, pay to print up CDs and Publicity material, hoping to make at least some money back through sales, only to have their hopes dashed by cynical downloaders purloining their content for free is also well heard. I am a photographer and have found my photographs on Google, adorning sites I’ve never heard of. A magazine recently offered me the princely sum of £2 for one picture – an improvement on last year when two magazines with high street distribution deals printed photographs of mine for no fee! At first glance, this embattled artist is tempted to agree that SOPA is not a bad thing.
But of course embattled artists are not the only losers, and if any government is passing legislation solely to protect the rights of struggling artists, frankly I’ll eat my hat. There are other players with much more to lose, and this is why there is such a fuss about SOPA.
This debate is about control. Control over the internet. Or to put it crudely, delivery of the internet into the hands of the vested interests providing content through established channels like print, film and CD.
Link sharing sites such as Reddit, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg etc will under the proposed acts be liable for prosecution if they are found to be distributing links to unoriginal material. In effect, this makes them vulnerable to frivolous litigation like never before. Big companies have deep pockets and will have no qualms about bankrupting the pretenders to their throne by forcing lawsuits to be defended.
The sponsorship of government advising think tanks by corporate interests has also been well documented as has the use of lobbyists by various industries to influence government thinking. The extent to which News International influenced successive elections in the UK can only be guessed at, but it is well documented that Rebekah Wade was a regular guest at the homes and offices of successive prime ministers. No coincidence when the Murdoch owned Sun, News of the World and Times all backed the same horse.
The appointment of Murdoch fan Jeremy Hunt to the Ministry of Culture and the subsequent proposal to allow Murdoch’s bid for BSkyB to be waved through could be interpreted as payback for the press support for the Tories before the election. It was only stopped by furious protests from the public and one newspaper’s, The Guardian, tireless quest to expose the illegal activities taking place in the News of the World under the auspices of …Rebekah Wade. Nobody should remain in any doubt that corporate interests influence and in some cases dictate government policy.
SOPA and its little brother PIPA are merely the instruments by which the corporate interests that control the old media, hope to wrest control of the new media away from Silicon Valley. It should be resisted at all costs, not because we prefer anarchy, but because democracy is founded on freedom of choice and if there is no freedom of information then there is no freedom of choice. I don’t mind sacrificing a few photographs to uphold that principle.
originally published at Electrical Image 18.1.12
Picking up on your comment “We’ve seen the effect of downloads on the music industry” which may be an irrelevant tangent or may be the basis of the whole article/legislation/campaigns, do we really know what the effect was? I know that a few years ago there was a massive drop in sales due to piracy. Empirically that was because the pirates/consumers understood the new world a lot faster than the big corporations. Nowadays I see the likes of iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and last.fm with sophisticated recommendation engines and really easy to use interfaces for purchasing music legally, with a much lower cost for delivering the music and yet charge not that much less for purchasing it. People can buy the music without having to pay to travel to a shop so more impulse buys and more speculative ones, they can pay to download it without a risk of viruses and without being restricted to only the more popular albums. Spotify, last.fm, sky etc are “making” people pay to listen to albums they already own. New artists/start up bands as well as very established ones are selling music directly to the people on-line and probably making more money than they did when the corporations were involved. Touring artists like Prince are giving their albums away and still making a fortune from the tour. Lady Gaga says she’s happy with the amount of money she makes even though she’s the most pirated artist. I know Lily Allen is moaning that she’s not making money because she’s stopped touring and people aren’t buying her music but she’s only famous because the bootlegs of her music spread for free over the net, and I bet she makes a lot from The X Factor etc using her music as the backing track to the sob stories. I know I consume a lot more music than I used to and through the choice and availability that the net brings and the sophisticated recommendation engines and the information about discographies on wikipedia, and I spend a lot more, particularly on concerts. So although there was a significant dip in music revenue due to piracy I wonder whether has continued.
Sam Garforth
January 18, 2012 at 9:07 pm
I completely agree Sam, my point was simply that Sony, from a position of owning the Walkman and several of the major record companies somehow, through a mixture of complacency, arrogance and crass stupidity let the golden goose slip out of their hands. The music business in the seventies, owned or controlled the whole production cycle from studio to vinyl pressing plant. From that position (which coincided with what surely seems like a golden age of creativity artistically speaking, they somehow contrived to end up in the parlous position they are in today, with Apple and Simon Cowell cracking the whip and profits a thing of the past.
Chris Wright
January 18, 2012 at 11:17 pm