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lions of users for simply doing something that wasn’t too terrible. This is like having a license to print money and a barrel of free ink. Today, it’s not like that. Copying is easy. Not just with the now-obsolete video cassettes and tape recorders; not just with CDs and DVDs. Today, we have the high-speed, cheap, near-universal internet. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google. The sheer tonnage of available, copyable information is huge. You can upload what you want, download what you want, and there’s nobody to stop you. Not only that, but copying will never be harder than it is today. Understandably, all of that freaks out the media industry. A lot. And they want it to stop. They want this infernal ‘copying’ to stop. The problem, however, is that copying is often sharing. And sharing is social. The majority of content on the internet isn’t produced by media companies. It’s produced by us. Because it turns out that, when given the opportunity, humans don’t just want to sit back and watch TV. Granted, we do want to do that, we also want to talk, and make, and share. As Clay Shirky says: Some of the stuff we share is stuff we’ve made. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we’ve found. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we’ve made out of what we’ve found, and all of it horrifies those industries. And on the internet, on computers, all of that sharing and making and remixing — literally all of
it — involves copying. It requires copying.
Positional definitional The position of the 20th century media industry, and the politicians they fund, is therefore essentially this: when you copy our content, you do it without our permission. We lose money, and that hurts, and that’s scary for us. And so, we want to take away your ability to copy and, incidentally, create. We want to put you back on the couch. We want to be the only producers of media, and we want you to be passive consumers. We were here first. We were the first to have wheels on our cars. We were the first to have cars. And frankly, we want the roads to ourselves again. So if we can get it by you, and you don’t fight to stop us, we’ll take all the wheels off all of your cars. We will police the roads with our sharktoothed lawyers, and if you try to use them, and you’re not from our gang, we will rip you to shreds. We will run the taxis, and the buses, and the trains, and the trams. And they’ll only take you where we want to go. What they risk doing, according to our oft-quoted Clay Shirky, is taking a centuries-old legal concept, innocent until proven guilty, and reversing it — guilty until proven innocent. You can’t share until you show us that you’re not sharing something we don’t like. Suddenly, the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities. And if it costs even a dime to police a
user, that will crush a service with a hundred million users. That’s their position. That’s why it sucks. It’s not a position isolated to SOPA and PIPA. There are countless other examples of the same war being fought by the same people to the same ends. SOPA and PIPA are renamed reworkings of an earlier bill, which also didn’t pass, called COICA. On a more sinister, worldwide scale, there’s a treaty being negotiated behind closed doors called ACTA: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which aims to deal with copyright enforcement on an international scale (and has some pretty terrifying drafted provisions).
The Reason This Matters The war matters, ultimately, because it’s not about piracy. It’s an attack on the same ‘function’ of the internet, and of computers, that lets us communicate freely. Without the open net, the social progress we see today would grind to a halt. Coordinated, simultaneous movements like Occupy would be impossible. Free encyclopedias would cease to be free — and the equal education that that provides would disappear. We would, as a society, be forced to share, and talk, and create only slowly and physically. In my view, that sucks. It doesn’t suck because I like Facebook, or because I like downloading pirated music. It sucks because sharing, and talking, and creating is how we work together. It’s how a culture — a group composed of us — works together to fix our culture’s problems and celebrate our solutions. It’s how we make ourselves better. It’s how we make ourselves great.
(off-campus)