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Dangerguerrero is correct that it’s not his responsibility, and I was being a little flippant about needing to provide a solution before you criticize. My point stands, though, that I’d love to see some of this passion put into finding solutions for the piracy issue. A lot of extremely smart people have joined together to voice their opposition to this bill. Well some of those same people need to figure out a way to protect content providers. SOPA/PIPA may not be the answer, but the alternative is not going to be a continuation of the status quo as too many people are being hurt by internet piracy. If no one in the tech community comes up with better solutions you’re going to wind up with some variation of the currently proposed legislation. So go ahead and put your little black boxes up, and then go back to the people who are telling you to protest and ask what they propose as a solution to the problem. Before you can come up with a solution to the problem of piracy, you (and I don’t mean you personally, Sam; this is an indefinite “you”) have to recognize one simple fact: You’ll never stop it. There will always be people with the abilities to overcome any technical hurdles, including the enforcement provisions in SOPA/PIPA. DRM? Made to be broken. Website takedowns? The content moves, or ends up on a USB drive, or gets distributed via a local peer-to-peer networking. The amount of effort needed to pirate something might increase, but it’s a small incremental cost. Meanwhile people trying to enjoy a work legitimately find they can’t copy that movie they just bought to their iPad, or that the DVD a friend sent them from overseas doesn’t work because of region encoding, or that their favourite website has been taken down because of a spurious claim by a copyright holder over content that wasn’t actually in violation of any laws (as could very well happen under SOPA/PIPA). They, not pirates, are the ones dissuaded from going about their business. If I want to download something from last week’s SNL (as an example), I can’t do so legally because of rights issues. My only option would be to find an illegal upload somewhere. The industry’s actions would force me to break the law to enjoy their works. Does that serve anyone’s interests? Of course not—but it’s what the industry has demanded. Everything the entertainment industry has done to try to stop piracy has served as a perverse incentive to engage in it. The solution? Forget about trying to stop it by technical means. Make it easier to buy and enjoy something legally than to try to find a torrent. Stop screwing around with DRM and region encoding and software rootkits, stop trying to limit how people use the media they’ve already purchased, stop making it hard for people to buy your product. Go after the large-scale pirates, sure (and I’d think the makers of counterfeit disks would be a far bigger economic problem than torrent sites), but lay off consumers. They’re the people whose support, economic and otherwise, you need—and if you continue to make it difficult for them to give you their money, you’re going to get to a point where piracy is the least of your worries. So this is where is gets funny. The technology does exist. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, iTunes. All sorts of services. And people pay for it! They like paying for it! Torrenting is actually down with all the pay services available. (Movies make up 35% of torrents, porn makes up about the same, and then the rest is books and TV according to a report commissioned by NBC Universal.) What do the studios do? Start to make those deals untenable because they believe they are not making enough from these legal deals and sadly, didn’t think streaming would grow as fast as it did and now want to launch their own services, or at least beef up that they offer on their own Hulu/Sony Store etc. But let me tell you, all of those aforementioned services would offer people entire catalogs if studios could come to a reasonable agreement to do so. Like Sam, I work in this business, as does my husband (disclosure - he currently works at one of the companies listed above) — as do almost all of our friends. “Copyright infringement” and “intellectual property” easily get thrown around to scare the artists. But they’re starting to see it’s just not true. Large conglomerates don’t give a fuck about the artists and the below the line crews. If they did, they wouldn’t taking films abroad because it’s cheaper, wouldn’t be outsourcing the F/X and post work to India, and wouldn’t be fighting against the Guilds on digital content royalties and residuals. Music only gets off slightly better, just because they were saved by technology like iTunes, but they went into that kicking and screaming. I recently had lunch with an old record label coworker of mine, industry vet of 20 years, and she said to me, “People just have to be in it because they like music now. It’s been sort of refreshing, watching who really has a passion versus who works for a paycheck.” Media companies miss the heyday of early to mid-aughts when everyone bought — BOUGHT! — DVDs at $20-$50 a pop. A special edition re-release with a new color correction but no new bonus features? People bought those too! Re-re-mastered Rolling Stones? Yes! Sold! They miss the never ending golden eggs and they blame the internet for their losses. Meanwhile, guys like Murdoch and Iger are taking about $30+ million a year. Back in the early 90s, when Eisner made about $10 million, it was shocking. Personally, I think the guys at the top entertainment industry grabbed too much and are going to fight to their death to never give it back.
