So the SOPA bill has been indefinitely delayed, and now there’s another similar bill in Europe called ACTA which will probably suffer the same fate. But now that the hoopla has died down, here is my two cents:
The entertainment industry lobbies that brought up this kind of “keep-things-the-way-they-are-for-us” legislation are certainly caught up in horse and buggy thinking, hoping that by leveraging their lobbying/legislative influence (and by using threats of criminal prosecution) they could somehow get people to not use new technology. For that reason alone they deserve to lose. But this problem is not going to go away.
Now as much as I love facebook and Google, let’s all be adults here and realize that these two web sites are making billions of dollars selling advertising. Now nobody wants to just see advertising. The reason people look at advertising is because it is juxtaposed with content that people DO want to see. But unlike previous standard sellers of advertising like radio, television, and newspapers, facebook and google are taking all the money, and are not paying anything at all for the production of content that is attracting viewers of the ads they sell.
I am all for the “freedom” of the Internet. And so of course these huge internet watering holes don’t want to see limits on what attracts their customers. But if these massive web sites are going to profit from content, then there should be some compensation for the people who provide the content. By not providing any payments, we doom ourselves to content that is either subsidized or done by amateurs.
Now in the case of facebook or youtube, for most folks the compensation is an even barter. If I need a place to show my baby pictures to my family, facebook provides that space, in exchange for their showing an ad to the three people come to see the baby pictures. And if someone wants to show a snippet of the movie they’re about to release for promotional purposes, that again is a perfectly fine barter of value.
But when it comes to content that has greater intrinsic value, something needs to be done. The ham-handed approach of SOPA is not the answer. Prosecuting teenagers for doing free downloads is not the answer. The answer is not to create all kinds of technological barriers that basically send us back to 1950. The answer is to create technologically advanced solutions that have mechanisms for compensation for the use of high-value intellectual property. That way everyone would be happy when their stuff gets aired on youtube. It would support the production of ever more content, attracting ever more viewers and ad dollars. It would not be that hard to have a pool of some percentage of the ad money generated by Google and facebook, or perhaps a blanket fee embedded in every monthly internet bill similar to the TV fees paid in britain, and have some distribution entity like ASCAP making payments to those people whose property is being broadcast on the Internet. And digital technology, which makes it so easy to steal, also makes it easy to keep track of it all.
Of course, the owners of intellectual property have to grasp the concept that the kinds of actual physical and mechanical control they once held no longer exist. But instead of one big check from NBC, they’re going to get a half a cent from every download and facebook share, and they will end up making just as much money if not more. Let’s stop prosecuting and start partnering.
