View Single Post
 
Old 01-21-2012, 09:43 PM
John Wagenseil John Wagenseil is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Eastern end of the Mid West US.
Posts: 3,682
Total Downloaded: 4.62 GB
Chris, I agree with you that piracy is a problem and it denies the author of new material the right to profit from his/her work.
The big file sharing sites generate huge profits for their operators through the outright theft of other people's intellectual property.
Taking down Megaupload is not a bad thing. However, what could happen beyond that is a major cause for concern.
Let us assume that SOPA passes and that there was such a thing as a rich and influential paper model publishing industry cartel. What if the paper model cartel decided this site was a threat to its control of the paper model market. Since nothing here is properly licensed, the paper model cartel could use its lobbying power to bring action against this site and have it taken down.

The problem is that SOPA as written and if strictly applied can make even sites like this one a 'Pirate site' because the public domain status of each of its offerings, each post and each link are not adequately documented. You'd have to contact each content author, each link target and have him/her/it sign off on some legal boiler plate, and attach it to each down load, each internal and external link, each post, and every single image in order to legitimize them. And what if there is a link to a site where copyright law is different from that of the US? Or to a site whose owner does not understand legal English and is unwilling to sign off on the document you must have if you are to legally link to his/her/its content. Bye, bye most Asian models. And bye bye vintage models if you cannot prove they are pre 1923 or that their creators or the heirs of the creators have abandoned copyright.
A lot of open source software and donation ware would also bite the dust if their developers do not have the financial resources to properly document their offerings. Eventually the Open Source Foundation or similar would get around to posting some standard forms to download and paste onto anything you wanted to offer on the internet, but even that might become a problem in recursiveness (certifying that the downloaded legal boilerplate is a legal download that was legitimately downloaded, ect ect) or making it broad enough to fit different media, prose, images, software ect.
You can bet your tuchas that MS for example would spend major dollars to use SOPA as a tool to try put an end to Linux, Open Office and Libre Office downloads and open source alternatives to its media player.
SOPA is a sledge hammer piece of legislation where something more subtle is needed. Megaupload was a major offender of intellectual property law, and was taken down. This shows that intellectual property rights can be protected without creating what essentially amounts to the nationalized internet SOPA would mandate.

(Various micropayment concepts have been floated as methods of seeing that content providers get reimbursed for their creative work. Actually the problem with almost all distribution schemes is that the attornies and distributors get the largest share of the cash flow, and only a tiny trickle gets to the actual content author.)

A heavy handed application of SOPA or similar law can become a vehicle for internet censorship.
The entertainment industry is not facing up to the reality that if a product can be digitized it will be pirated. The movie and music industries within living memory made their money, and a lot of it, with live or theater performances. They want to infinitely scale up their incomes by selling recordings while not being willing to tolerate the risk that the recordings can be copied and distributed outside their market network.
If they do not want their media product pirated with high quality copies, then they should only offer it in the form of live or theatrical performances and forego the home market, or create a technology that makes their product pirate proof while not imposing that technology on people who are willing to forego their product.
The entertainment industry should not be able to use its influence to impose draconian controls on internet access and linking in order to protect an obsolescent marketing model, at the cost of doing damage to the information exchange that keeps the rest of the US economy going.

Last edited by John Wagenseil; 01-21-2012 at 10:06 PM. Reason: more clarity, more commas.
Reply With Quote