It Is Time To Stop Pretending To Endorse The Copyright Monopoly
A few thoughts:1. I am against SOPA-style enforcement schemes as much as is anyone here at HN - laws that impose potentially ruinous penalties based on vague standards lacking all due process protections are laws that stink, however assessed, and SOPA offers that and little more amidst a drama featuring shady lobbyists, venal motives, and hordes of lawyers waiting in the wings to wreak havoc on the core elements of the Internet and the public at large in order to promote the interests of a narrow faction of copyright holders.2. It is not true, however, that the continued enforcement of copyright laws in a hyper-connected world depends on having SOPA-style laws in effect. The legitimate concerns bothering people about mass infringement on the web were addressed years ago in the DMCA and its scheme of offering safe harbors to those who upheld copyright while allowing for legal action against those who didn't has been a reasonable solution to the difficult problem of how to curb infringement when copying digital content is so easy. The SOPA-style laws are clearly an attempted power grab by which content holders now seek to overreach to get special advantages for themselves at the expense of everyone else. This is wrong but it is not an inevitable part of maintaining copyright protection. Indeed, it is not even a wise or prudent part of maintaining such protection, as is evident from the reaction it has provoked. By framing his argument in the way of claiming that it is, then, the author is setting up a straw-man argument against which he can declaim (in effect, saying, "see, copyright is culturally oppressive and can only exist as part of a regime that denies people civil liberties and many other things they treasure" and it can be nothing else than this - therefore, you either support copyright and its inevitable accompanying oppression or you support civil liberties - this is a false dichotomy).3. Copyright can easily be abused and that is why laws relating to it need to be very carefully framed. That said, the protection it affords is an integral part of our modern world and does protect creative effort to a significant degree. Without copyright, I could take apart J.K Rowling's billion dollar Harry Potter empire by simply republishing and selling all the works myself, without compensation to Ms. Rowling. Without copyright, I could take Pixar's Toy Story movies and characters and reproduce them for my profit at my whim. Without copyright, I could take any company's source code and lift it for my commercial use while leaving the company that spent millions developing it without recourse. Without copyright, anything you or I write on our blogs, or in books, or anywhere else, can freely be used by anybody, word-for-word, and passed off as something having nothing to do with the author who in fact put in the creative effort to compose it. This list of such consequences is long and extends far beyond a narrow "content industry" composed of conglomerates - it reaches down to everyday people who, knowingly or not, rely on copyright to ensure that their creative work belongs to them and cannot be used indiscriminately by others.4. There is, of course, a philosophical argument that all information ought to be free and that its use and dissemination should not be restricted in any way by any form of legal restriction. There is a case to be made for this argument, one with which I would not agree but one which nonetheless can be made in good faith as a goal of trying to achieve a better society. I do not denigrate that argument even as I oppose it. It is undeniable, however, that a society cast in this way would be radically different in terms of how it treats intangible rights and I believe that most people would oppose those changes. SOPA has whatever momentum it does have precisely because many people do feel it is a problem that creative content can be copied at will and without compensation in so many ways across the web. This gives a colorable reason for why SOPA is needed and SOPA proponents exploit this widespread feeling among the public, in effect, to try to put one over on people.5. In the U.S., copyright has deep roots and is seriously grounded in the federal constitution and in congressional enabling legislation going back to the nation's founding. While copyright acts dating back hundreds of years to England were sometimes used as instruments of government oppression, that can't be said of how such laws have been implemented and enforced in the U.S. for over 200 years now. This fact is not changed by using loaded expressions such as "cultural monopoly" to describe those laws. Yes, studios and publishing houses have used the force of those laws to set up distribution mechanisms that have often given them large slices of the profits from the creative efforts of authors, filmmakers, etc. But that simply reflects the fact that huge sums of capital were needed to set up and maintain such distribution mechanisms and few could afford to take such steps independently of a close group of large entities. This "monopoly," if you want to call it that, is being broken up today because of the increased independence creative people have with modern technology. Those creative people, though, want to profit from their efforts even as they shed the old constraints - they don't want their works to become instant common property, usable and salable by all without compensation to the original creator, simply because technology enables easy copying.6. Therefore, it is possible to oppose SOPA and endorse copyright laws with complete consistency. One can oppose overreach that leads to manifold evils while protecting the core of something that is worthy of protection. I think this article gets it all wrong on this score and therefore, while making some good points, is flawed in its core premise.