I keep seeing these “Stop Piracy” links on my Facebook page here, and I note a couple of interesting things. It's interesting how easy it is, when protesting, to fail to give an accurate and balanced view of the situation. I've had a hard time discovering for myself what's in these bills. All I've seen are a bunch of internet sites like Wikipedia ranting about it. Maybe their rants are perfectly justified. But maybe, just maybe, I'd like to see the legislation for myself and make a decision that is more informed than the average American's decision is going to be. This, for example, comes from the widely-circulating link from Google, "End Piracy, not liberty:" Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Now, that single sentence is highly provocative and is apt to cause readers to swell with indignation. It's a carefully calculated piece of jingoistic propaganda which is designed to motivate you to fight to the death for your rights. It smacks of “give me liberty [read internet] or give me death.” Hang on, though. Hold it a sec. Think with me about that one sentence for a moment before moving on, "would censor the web?" Every time a cite is banned for bootlegging uncopyrighted movies, that's a form of censorship. Yet, we don't seem to complain. When parents impose controls that filter what their kids can and can’t view on the net, that's censorship of a sort. Do we complain? Companies, colleges and universities (especially private ones) have regulations and guidelines out the old ying-yang telling their customers, employees, students and other staff what they may, may not, or must view. Is that censorship? Yet, we don't complain. “Impose harmful regulations on American business.” Ok, what regulations? Who would be affected? Wikipedia certainly wouldn’t be in my opinion. It’s free. The advertisers who support Wikipedia and Google? Well, before you say anything, remember, Google already limits what you can advertise on there. The limits aren’t anything most of us would protest against and consist of things we would find sensible. Go read their policy on this subject, but it is a form of, dare I say it, “censorship.” And I’m not even saying they’re wrong. I’m saying that no one, not even the BBC article I read courtesy of someone on my Facebook page this afternoon, is bothering to find out what, exactly what, is contained in these bills. So, I tried to. Where are the bills? By the way, if anyone does discover the full text of the bills, send me a link. Maybe I’ll revise my opinions in light of what I read, maybe not. In any case, googling the bill titles or legislation numbers does little good. You can find ten thousand articles about the protests or articles that claim to explain what the bills are about, to be sure. There’s even a Wikipedia article on each one. But how much can I trust Wikipedia to provide me with a fair and balanced view of what the bills contain? I don’t have anything against Wikipedia, mind you, but this cite is adamantly opposed to the legislation, and so its point-of-view is already suspect. Similarly, most media has a left-leaning bias and will always present the anti-censorship position. I don’t want pro or anti-bill arguments. I want to read the actual text and nothing but the text of the very legislation itself. That’s what all of us need to be doing. Yes, it may require using a dictionary and it won’t be as easy to read as a fluff novel, but reading the legislation itself, for yourself, is the only way you have of insuring that you make a decision that is truly your own. Otherwise, good luck..
Now then, based on what I was able to find, even using Wikipedia’s own information against it, as it were, here’s some food for thought. This reminds me of the Nabster crisis. The music industry is still struggling with lost revenues from artists whose works are transferred through file sharing again and again. Nowadays, there are plenty of ways to buy music digitally and legally. I have no problem paying $0.99 for a song. I have no problem paying Netflicks for movies or TV viewing if I want to. I believe that an artist or author should be compensated for their work. I’ve written stories. None of them are published, but I’ve done it. If I ever did publish something I’ve written, I’d want to choose whether or not to make money from it. If I publish it on Hubpages, for example, then it’s free and open to everyone. That’s probably what I’d do But suppose, just suppose, that you, the reader here, publish something like a novella in an anthology or in some other royalty-generating way. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. If you want to make your livelihood with the written word, I wish you well. Then, supposing someone took your novella or poetry collection that you’d legally copyrighted and put into bookstores, hand scanned it with a doc scanner and posted it to the web, how would you feel about it. They could even do so without mentioning your name. What would you think of that? If you find yourself not liking that idea very much, well, now you’re starting to get it. Foreign web sites, those beyond the reach of our laws, can do just that and have done it.
Let’s consider something else beyond the issue of censorship. Opponents of these two bills moan about first amendment rights. Big surprise there. Now, I’m a fan of the first amendment, no matter what the radical left thinks. Consider this: it is illegal to threaten to bomb a plane or a building. It is generally illegal to crash a commercial site with spam messages. It is illegal to talk to the Taliban about plans to poison America’s water supply. You can’t even shout, “fire,” in a movie theater. These are all exercises of speech, and there are those who’d claim that every one of them should be allowed in theory because of freedom of speech. What I am saying is just this: there have been times and places where we have seen fit to restrict or censor the freedom of speech or press. Now, given that, the question is not or should not be, “are these bills violating our first amendment rights.” The question we should be asking is, “what do first amendment advocates want to be able to do that these bills would limit them from doing?” Online publishing of their own work? I don’t think so. Sharing free content? I don’t think so either. Does it ban people from doing business with or supporting certain web sites? What kinds of sites? Well, if it bans them from opportunistically supporting sites that specialize in distributing copyrighted materials to people who haven’t paid for them, well, shouldn’t they be banned from doing so?
There’s another provision, so it seems, that would penalize users, possibly criminally, for continued streaming or downloading of copyrighted internet content that they haven't paid for or gotten permission to use. Now, I’m sure we’ve all done this at some point at one time or another. I’m sure I have, possibly without even knowing it. Sometimes, though, I did know it. These issues of streaming and file sharing are new ones relatively speaking. Our copyright laws have only begun to address this issue, because up to about a decade ago, this form of digital media simply wasn’t available and it wasn’t the way people chose to publish. But now with ITunes, Amazon’s Kindle reader, Audible and Google Books, electronic media is becoming the means of publication for everything from songs to poetry to doctoral dissertations to the latest novels. Now, I remember when file sharing was only just starting to be cracked down on by the R.I.A.A. I knew, and still know, people with not hundreds, or thousands, but tens of thousands of songs sitting on their hard drives, all illegally file shared. Now, my friend Nick can give you a better idea of when a song that you get is legally gotten and when it’s not. Suffice it to say that not all songs you get for free are illegally had, but that the big file sharing sites like LimeWire, Kazaa or whatever people are using today are not legal means of exchanging tunes. So, take an acquaintance of mine who has something like twenty thousand songs on his hard drive. If fifteen thousand of them are illegal downloads or file shares, then, at a cost of, let us say, one dime per song, that represents $1500 worth of music that he didn’t pay for. If we were talking about jewelry or food or any tangible goods, the phrase we’d use is “stolen property.” In fact, at that value’s worth of goods, we’d be talking about felony prosecution for grand larceny.
So, should it make a difference whether the goods stolen are shoes or songs? Some think it should make a difference indeed. Many people feel like you shouldn’t prosecute someone for piracy like the type I’ve been describing. Yet, I ask, what is the real difference between steeling $100 worth of shirts from Coal’s or steeling $100 worth of movies or songs from their makers. The difference is only in technique. When I steel a shirt, I walk into a store, take a shirt off the rack and walk out with it. Alternatively, I do the same from my friend’s dresser. I’ve still absconded with property that I do not own. I didn’t pay the store for it, nor did I pay sales tax on it. I have stolen it. If I steel it from my buddy’s dresser, I’ve freely taken something to which his money entitled him, not me. But there’s a perception out there that if I download your movie from a web site that offers it, what have I really done? It’s harmless, right? Well, no. Because actors, directors, camera people, makeup artists, sound effects people, and musicians and writers made that movie to sell to you in the hopes that you’d enjoy it and that they’d make a little money from it. What’s wrong with that? In my view, nothing.
Finally, some critics warn that if the American government is prepared to ban foreign web sites for whatever reasons, then foreign countries may ban American web sites for their own social and political reasons, thereby harming us. Well, that’s their right. That’s why it’s called a “foreign” country. I don’t really care whether China bans Facebook or whether or not the Saudis ban Amazon. Of course, Facebook and Amazon may care a great deal; I don’t know. But foreign governments can do whatever they want with the internet in their country. I think we’re big enough to take it if France bans a web site or two or if the Brits don’t like one of our news outlets because it infringes on their personal privacy acts by reporting confidential news. Guess what. We don’t own the net and it’s not up to us to tell other countries what to do with it. It is our job to protect ourselves. That may mean that we ban some foreign sites from doing business with us in order to protect our own copyrights. And it may have the consequence that foreign governments do it to us. Tough. If we can do it, why can’t they? In fact, some do. Check out China.
Fundamentally, I disagree with Professor Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law prof who specializes in the Constitution. He claims that SOPA and PIPA would undermine freedom of speech and the free exchange of information on the internet. I don’t see any inconsistencies in trying to balance an open forum like the net with safeguarding the property rights of people who have something worth protecting. And it is property, people. Even if it’s not a house or a car or a shirt, it’s still theirs, and if you didn’t pay for it and they didn’t give it away, you have no damned right to it. End of discussion. Replies should be … interesting.
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