SOPA isn’t dead. Far from it.
The people behind that bill and a host of other bills over the years are able to bring that bill, or its equivalent, back as many times as they please, until they have a legislature and president willing to pass it and sign it.
SOPA primarily is supported by money, but it is primarily only opposed by speech.
Money buys votes, essentially. It buys the votes of the legislature, because money buys your vote.
In nine out of ten USA senatorial or congressional races, the candidate with the largest campaign fund wins. This is not because all that campaigning changes the minds of voters, but because it increases the turnout of voters aligned with the position on polling day.
Therefore in all but the most exceptional cases, whichever candidate has the most money to spend on their campaign wins the election.
Winners of Senate seats currently spend roughly eight million dollars in campaign funds for the win.
For a 312 week term, that means that a US Senator must generate a net profit in campaign funds of a little over $25,000 per week, for every week in office. If special-interests and contributors don’t provide you with enough funds, you are statistically unlikely to win reelection, even if you cure cancer in your spare time. You may as well find another job. Maybe as a lobbyist.
Money talks. It talks real loud.
Now, recently, there were a couple of forms of activism about SOPA. A whole bunch of people put a marker on their social media profiles. There’s little sign that this made a damn bit of difference. Neither your Senator nor your Congressman likely ever sees your social media profile – and probably hardly any of anyone else’s.
The total number of profiles changed by this so-called “slacktivism” amounted to roughly 0.028% of the United States population. Fewer, if you count the number of slacktivist participants from the USA.
However, on the day that Web-sites world-wide went dark in opposition to SOPA, the game changed. That wasn’t opposition with speech – it was opposition with money. People willingly sacrificing their profits, services and products to oppose the bill, and directing people to contact their legislative representatives.
And people did.
How many times in the past decade has your legislative representative heard from any of the people she represents? Heck, if porn sites had gone offline for the day, the phones would still be ringing on the Hill, and US Postal Service workers would be risking their health lugging overstuffed mailbags.
There was pretty much no shift in legislative support or opposition for SOPA until sites started blacking out and phone calls and emails started arriving on the Hill.
Now, I’ve talked very little about the content of SOPA. The “Stop Online Piracy Act” appears to have very little to actually do with online piracy, and even less with stopping it.
What it does appear to do is give “Old Media” a nice big stick with which to turn “New Media” into a cowed and profitable vassalage, and little else.
Now if there was a bill that really managed to seriously cut into the big-money piracy such as that from the CRIA or the so-called “Hollywood Accounting” indulged in by MPAA members, that would certainly be something to get behind.
SOPA, or something only barely distinguishable from it, will come back again and again. The money is there, and the members of the legislature cannot live without it to buy your votes. The MPAA publicly and directly threatened to cut off their not-inconsiderable donations to candidates who do not dance to the MPAA’s tune. That’s no trivial threat – losing that money can put many members of the legislature on the unemployment line come the next election.
Oh, and for those of you who do not remember The Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences, for which this post is headlined, it is: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”
| SOPA isn’t dead. Far from it.
The people behind that bill and a host of other bills over the years are able to bring that bill, or its equivalent, back as many times as they please, until they have a legislature and president willing to pass it and sign it.
SOPA primarily is supported by money, but it is primarily only opposed by speech.
Money buys votes, essentially. It buys the votes of the legislature, because money buys your vote.
In nine out of ten USA senatorial or congressional races, the candidate with the largest campaign fund wins. This is not because all that campaigning changes the minds of voters, but because it increases the turnout of voters aligned with the position on polling day.
Therefore in all but the most exceptional cases, whichever candidate has the most money to spend on their campaign wins the election.
Winners of Senate seats currently spend roughly eight million dollars in campaign funds for the win.
For a 312 week term, that means that a US Senator must generate a net profit in campaign funds of a little over $25,000 per week, for every week in office. If special-interests and contributors don’t provide you with enough funds, you are statistically unlikely to win reelection, even if you cure cancer in your spare time. You may as well find another job. Maybe as a lobbyist.
Money talks. It talks real loud.
Now, recently, there were a couple of forms of activism about SOPA. A whole bunch of people put a marker on their social media profiles. There’s little sign that this made a damn bit of difference. Neither your Senator nor your Congressman likely ever sees your social media profile – and probably hardly any of anyone else’s.
The total number of profiles changed by this so-called “slacktivism” amounted to roughly 0.028% of the United States population. Fewer, if you count the number of slacktivist participants from the USA.
However, on the day that Web-sites world-wide went dark in opposition to SOPA, the game changed. That wasn’t opposition with speech – it was opposition with money. People willingly sacrificing their profits, services and products to oppose the bill, and directing people to contact their legislative representatives.
And people did.
How many times in the past decade has your legislative representative heard from any of the people she represents? Heck, if porn sites had gone offline for the day, the phones would still be ringing on the Hill, and US Postal Service workers would be risking their health lugging overstuffed mailbags.
There was pretty much no shift in legislative support or opposition for SOPA until sites started blacking out and phone calls and emails started arriving on the Hill.
Now, I’ve talked very little about the content of SOPA. The “Stop Online Piracy Act” appears to have very little to actually do with online piracy, and even less with stopping it.
What it does appear to do is give “Old Media” a nice big stick with which to turn “New Media” into a cowed and profitable vassalage, and little else.
Now if there was a bill that really managed to seriously cut into the big-money piracy such as that from the CRIA or the so-called “Hollywood Accounting” indulged in by MPAA members, that would certainly be something to get behind.
SOPA, or something only barely distinguishable from it, will come back again and again. The money is there, and the members of the legislature cannot live without it to buy your votes. The MPAA publicly and directly threatened to cut off their not-inconsiderable donations to candidates who do not dance to the MPAA’s tune. That's no trivial threat - losing that money can put many members of the legislature on the unemployment line come the next election.
Oh, and for those of you who do not remember The Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences, for which this post is headlined, it is: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” | |  | |
Tags: Copyright, CRIA, Culture, Hollywood Accounting, Law, MPAA, Opinion, Slacktivism, Social Media, SOPA, US Legislature
This entry was posted
on Monday, 23rd January, 2012.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Possibly related posts
The level 20 rule, Syrian Government presses its own “Like” button, Linden Endowment for the Arts not quite so moribund, Status of the Linden Endowment for the Arts, The golden handshake
(subscribing to coments)
I afraid your are right.
What we need is something like the NRA that can alert a large number of people to apply pressure on Congress. The EFF might be able to fill that role.
The only solution to representatives and laws being bought is to restrict government to its proper function, so it’s no longer worth buying. So-called campaign finance reform laws are worked around, and the workarounds become the bogeyman that the next useless reform law is designed to stop; they do no good, and a lot of harm.
Voting with your wallet is usually a positive thing, but only when it is about customers voting for/against companies. They should make it serious crime for politicians to receive money in connection with making decisions that affect people that aren’t flashing their wallets at them; allowing individuals’ ability to control the government be proportional to how much money they have is asking for trouble, this can easily lead to feedback loops that quickly push the government in directions that are bad for the people.
make it a serious crime*
(fix it and delete this comment please?)
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
My fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, put it well in an analog age. We will have to keep fighting until the mavens of old media, who buy and sell politicians, join the record industry in the dustbins of technological history.
There, I’ve mixed Marx and Jefferson in one reply.
But short of some sort of Constitutional protection, we’ll use the EFF as our NRA, as Nightbird suggests. At least, in this issue, we have something the libertarian left and right can agree to block.
There will be more efficient IP laws anytime soon, if not SOPA then something different. It is inavoidable. Corporation and freelance profits and billions of tax money are hurt badly by piracy and this will and cannot be accepted any longer. The problem there is the possible “collateral damage” such rules and regulations can cause. One should be careful with connecting rejection of overdue anti-piracy laws with support for piracy. And the victims of piracy should take care that they do not get connected to Big Brother and a potential abusive and destructive law. SOPA isn´t well balanced and badly crafted, but the next bill most probably and hopefully will be. Neither Marx nor Jefferson were supporters of piracy as a form of liberty, in fact, and economical and philosophical liberty can only prevail when protected effectively against theft and robbery.
I’m pretty sure those big companies significantly overestimate the loss of money due to so called piracy; in some cases it is so much not a loss that they actually are making more money than they would be if there weren’t unauthorized copies avaiable (people that try before buying, word of mouth popularizing a program and making it an industry standard without they having to spend any money on advertisements, webradios playing a song often enough that listeners start liking it and go buy the songs, people using songs in their videos introducing the songs to whole audiences that wouldn’t even be aware of it otherwise and so on)
@Tigro
Some supplemental reading on the topic of your responses (not a political paper, but an indie games producer’s sales data – in contrast to “those big companies”):
… not exactly sure if this parses links or markup *dives in*
http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/proun-is-big-success-pay-what-you-want.html
@ Tigro
No one prohibits publishing declared public domain music/software/artwork. In case you support this kind of publishing and spreading art or any kind of creative work, go ahead. Not a single anti-piracy law would be violated then. But in case someone publishes artwork/software under a certain license, this someone must be able to enforce the rules and regulations effectively and without spending zillions on lawyers buerocracy and waiting for enforcement for years. The recent global anti-piracy laws fail there. So what do you expect the skilled, professional artist/developer to do? Release for free as a hobbyist? This will not work on a professional level, such an idea not only contradicts not any economical theory but it´s failure is impressively proven by history. So, It´s not only the “big corporations”, everyone working in advanced arts, culture and development is harmed by the ongoing, massive IP theft. Something must change, it´s overdue. Wild West romanticism is not necessarily the economical and ethical requirement of the 21st century – and even the Wild West had gunmen and yes, the law.
Their goal should be to find ways to make people want to send money to them, they should focus on pleasing the people that would send them money and not on displeasing people that wouldn’t. It’s not a matter of punishing people that copy things and making harder for copies to be made, it’s a matter of rewarding people that do send them money and making it easier for people to do so.
ps: copying isn’t the same thing as stealing; they misuse words to produce a stronger emotional response and try to disguise what is really involved
Tigro, i really like your idea, but: Set up a hundred “pay what you want” vendors in Second Life, offer some really perfectly crafted items, unique RL (!) professional work you completed by spending 500 work hours or more and please the audience by all means. And then try to balance the cost for running SL (not to mention your RL investments) by your income. Good luck with it. SL is a harsh mistress.
The problem is like one of those trick knots with multiple ends. Pull on one of those ends and it gets tighter. You’ve got to pull on the right ends the right way for it all to come undone.
One end, obviously, is the piracy itself. There’s some amount of it going on, and stopping it is an issue.
Another end is the studios and labels themselves – every time a process has been made available to them (like the DMCA, mass-filesharing lawsuits by IP, or streamlined content-examination-and-reporting interfaces provided by some content hosts) they’ve gone berserk filing takedowns against content that they’ve got no rights to and against people who haven’t infringed.
A couple of record labels have been using a tool that detects the presence of background music in online videos, and then files a takedown notice against the video, on the assumption that the music must be infringing. This has targeted clips produced by individual composers, campfire singalongs and childrens’ birthday parties. Sometimes content taken down is not replaceable.
That’s just not right. I know that some people think that this may be even worse than the problem that they’re trying to solve.
The Canadian Record Industry Association which has been trying for so long and so loudly to clamp down on some unknown levels of piracy was itself the largest content pirate in the country, having pirated every single piece of music that it published in the last 32 years. “Oh, we really meant to pay, but it didn’t seem like a productive use of our administrative time.” Seriously.
And this, I think, is the issue. The situation has degenerated to the point where many of us, who create content that is infringed, could do with simpler, faster, cheaper, more effective legal avenues, and that would be great. You probably get as tired as I do of filing DMCA notices each year. It’s a drag, and at times it feels like a colossal waste of effort.
But then I think of putting such tools in the hands of the MPAA and the RIAA who have proven time and again in the last five to seven years that they cannot be trusted to use those tools responsibly, and that they will wave them around indiscriminately without caring whether the affected parties are infringing or if the content infringes…. and I think… no. That problem needs to be solved simultaneously with the other, otherwise the situation just gets worse, not better.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a permanent solution for piracy itself, at least none that won’t do way more harm than good. IMO the existence of piracy should be treated as a law of nature, and busyness models should be adapted to take in consideration the fact piracy is unavoidable. Resources spent trying to fight piracy should be redirected towards more fruitful purposes such as improving products, public relations etc
@ Tateru
Agreed, and that´s why i do not like the SOPA. It´s just a legal mess and leaves open too many uncertainities and has a tremendous abusive potential. Nevertheless i support the cause itself.
And face it, piracy always needs two participiants: The ones who steal and the ones who mistake usage of stolen goods as part of their personal liberty. The wishiwashi legislation and all the abuse mentioned by you only resulted in some kind of public feeling that using a legally protected virtual item, as soon as published in a digital format, is different from using (for example) someones car without permission. But it is not different, of course. But tell this to the public.
A part (not all!) of the anti-SOPA campaign certainly was not driven by concern about restrictions on personal liberty or freedom, but by economical interests. It´s like: “Hell, you want me to PAY for what i take for granted? NO WAY!” and, in case of sites like Google: “Hell, you want to burden work on us for taking action against thiefs? NO WAY”.
Vivienne, your analogy is incorrect.
It is actually more like taking a picture of someone’s car on the street and then having your own factory robots build you a copy of that car out of raw materials you legally acquired and using electricity and other energy sources that you legally paid for.
Like i said, copying is not the same as stealing, no matter how much the record companies and movie studios want you to believe otherwise.
@ Tigro
“and busyness models should be adapted to take in consideration the fact piracy is unavoidable”.
Business models calculate prices, Tigro, otherwise they will not work. And these prices are based on market realities, which include the existing loss by theft, fraud or any other crime. That´s why people pay a lot more money for an OS or an AAA game than they would pay witout the calculated loss as a result of piracy. If they pay at all. But as soon as no one will pay any longer, there will be no more OS and no more AAA game at all.
The unlawful distribution of others’ intellectual property is, I think, more serious than stealing. Calling it stealing cheapens or diminishes it. Once some bugger is making a profit out of distributing it you can never really put that genie back in the bottle. Stolen property can be returned or replaced, but an infringement of a right cannot be so readily reversed.
In the old days, artists were paid to produce art, they weren’t paid for art that already existed, much less for when said art was resold or put on display to the public; performance artists were paid for actually performing, and not for past performances nor for when someone else performed. Somewhere along the line things got more and more distorted and now one-hit-wonders can retire and still keep getting paid many years after they last created anything or actually performed their hit piece.