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Law in the Internet Society
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The Stop Online Piracy Act: the blindness continues-- By DiegodelaPuente - 15 Nov 2011The Futile Stop Online Piracy Act's discussion
U.S. Congress’ discussion about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) does not contribute to the Net’s growth; on the contrary, it distracts public attention to the real issue: copyright is no longer needed in the Internet society where we live in. SOPA tries to expand the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders’ power allowing seeking court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Without understanding our actual technological sharing world without frontiers and different ownership rules, Representative Lamar Smith, one of the chief sponsors of the bill, said, “SOPA is needed because rogue websites are stealing and selling American innovations”. Moreover, even SOPA’s most famous detractors, Google, Facebook, AOL and Twitter, are only arguing about Internet censorship or chilling effects on speech, rather than proposing a radical change to the actual copyright framework in accordance with new technological trends, which is intended by many recognized scholars and scientists, such as Kevin Kelly (Wired Magazine), Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Mike Masnick (Techdirt) and James Allsworth (Harvard Business School). Unfortunately, this new vision of content industries (film, television, books, software, music and others), with the absence of copyright law has been rejected by content industries monopolies represented by the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America or Business Software Alliance and the American Government itself as Wired Magazine have revealed recently. Principally, these monopolies feared to loose the annual millionaire earnings they received under the current ownership system and disguise their intentions stating that SOPA will protect artist’s intellectual property, including the resultant revenue and jobs. Moreover, in respect to the music industry, Dr. Robert Levine (former Billboard executive editor), said that the best way to save artists’ jobs is to strengthen copyright law. I disagree with that mistaken idea and will try to prove that without copyright, artists will continue to have incentives to innovate and produce culture.
Stop Online Piracy Act
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
- http://americancensorship.org
The new legal and economical model
Copyright is outdated and lacks of effectiveness, because it does not consider the social changes that technology has generated. When Copyright was born it was believed that monopolistic financial incentives stimulate artistic production and that it will guarantee artists a decent income and subsidize certain professions. As Ithiel de Sola Pool stated in 1983, with the arrival of electronic reproduction, copyright practices become unworkable. In that sense, some scholars such as Danny Colligan had written about why copyright is detrimental to society nowadays, referring that Copyright enforcement necessarily entails monitoring of all computer communications, and therefore the destruction of online privacy, erodes the public domain and free culture, criminalizes a large percentage of the population and poses large economic costs to society. In this new age, content is information and on a computer, information is anything that can be digitized, that is, encoded in a sequence of zeros and ones. In that order of ideas, information now has two important properties that modify the foundations of Copyright: it is both non-exclusive (any number of people can access and use it simultaneously) and non-rivalrous (the fact that one person has more information does not imply that another person has less).
New model
- Kevin Kelly, Better than Free (January 31, 2008) (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html)
- Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (November 11, 2005) (http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm)
- Richard Stallman, Misinterpreting Copyright (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html)
- Mike Masnik, Saying You Can't Compete With Free Is Saying You Can't Compete Period, Techdirt (February 15, 2007) (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070215/002923.shtml)
- Fred Wilson, Freemium and Freeconomics (July 4, 2009) (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/freemium-and-freeconomics.html)
ConclusionsSubsection BConclusionsInformation sourcesStop Online Piracy Act - Stop Online Piracy Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act) - http://americancensorship.org - David Kravets, Chief Sponsor Wavers on Web Censorship Bill in Charged Hearing, Wired (November 16, 2011) (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/piracy-blacklisting-bill) - SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) debate: Why are Google and Facebook against it? (November 17, 2011) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/sopa-stop-online-piracy-act-debate-why-are-google-and-facebook-against-it/2011/11/17/gIQAvLubVN_story.html) - Caitlin Bronson, Online Piracy Act Struggles in Congress (November 29, 2011) (http://www.thirdage.com/news/online-piracy-act-struggles-in-congress_11-29-2011) - Stop the Stop Online Piracy Act Now (November 21, 2011) (http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/11/21/stop-the-stop-online-piracy-act-now.aspx) - Timothy B. Lee, The Stop Online Piracy Act: Big Content's full-on assault against the Safe Harbor, ARS Technica (November 2011) (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/the-stop-online-piracy-act-big-contents-full-on-assault-against-the-safe-harbor.ars - David Cravets, U.S. Copyright Czar Cozied Up to Content Industry, E-Mails Show, Wired (October 14, 2011) (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/copyright-czar-cozies-up) Copyright and Freemium - Kevin Kelly, Better than Free (January 31, 2008) (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html) - Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (November 11, 2005) (http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm) - Richard Stallman, Misinterpreting Copyright (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html) - Mike Masnik, Saying You Can't Compete With Free Is Saying You Can't Compete Period, Techdirt (February 15, 2007) (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070215/002923.shtml) - Fred Wilson, Freemium and Freeconomics (July 4, 2009) (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/freemium-and-freeconomics.html) - Fred Wilson, My Favorite Business Model (March 23, 2006) (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/03/my_favorite_bus.html) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithiel_de_Sola_Pool - Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom (1983). (http://books.google.com/books?id=BzLXGUxV4CkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Technologies+of+freedom&hl=en&ei=8M_WTpr_IIbi0QGU2NnoAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false) - Eric Schlachter, The Intellectual Property Renaissance in Cyberspace: Why Copyright Law Could Be Unimportant on the Internet, Berkeley Technological Law Journal (1997) (http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/vol12/Schlachter/html/reader.html) - Danny Colligan, What We Lose When We Embrace Copyright (February 11, 2010) (http://questioncopyright.org/what_we_lose_when_we_embrace_copyright) - Melody Walker, Economists say copyright and patent laws are killing innovation; hurting economy (March 5, 2009) (http://www.physorg.com/news155495067.html) - Scott Timberg, Does culture really want to be free? (November 1, 2011) (http://www.salon.com/2011/11/01/does_culture_really_want_to_be_free/singleton) - Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel, Imagine a world without copyright, New York Times (October 8, 2005) (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/07/opinion/07iht-edsmiers.html?pagewanted=all) - Nico van EIJK, Legal, Economic and Cultural Aspects of File Sharing (March 30, 2010) (http://www.ivir.nl/publications/vaneijk/Communications&Strategies_2010.pdf) - Mark A. Lemley, Is the Sky Falling Dawn on the Content Industries? (2011) (http://www.jthtl.org/content/articles/V9I1/JTHTLv9i1_Lemley.PDF) - Steven Levy, Facebook, Spotify and the Future of Music (October 21, 2011) (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_music) - Nate Anderson, Big Content to FCC: don't kill our ISP filtering dream!, ARS Technica (2009) (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/big-content-still-cant-compete-with-free.ars) - JRC Scientific and Technical Reports, The Future Evolution of the Creative Content Industries (2008) (http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC47964.pdf) - Anita Elberse, Bye Bye Bundles: The Unbundling of Music in Digital Channels (November 1, 2009) (http://www.people.hbs.edu/aelberse/papers/Elberse_2010.pdf) - Scott Berinato, The iTunes Effect and the Future of Content, Havard Business Review (http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/01/the-itunes-effect-and-the-futu.html) - Gerd Leonhard, The Future of the Content Industries (April 2011) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLxEqy3lngk) - Gerd Leonhard, Free & Freemium Business Models (June 2011) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uOsLgTMGqc) Open Source Information - Eric Steven Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar) - What would Jesus hack? Cybertheology: Just how much does Christian doctrine have in common with the open-source software movement?, The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21527031)You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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