If I steal a brick from you, you no longer have the brick. But if I make a digital copy of a song on your hard drive, we both have it.
Some people think that makes all the difference, and that copying digital information is an entirely different thing from taking a tangible thing. I don’t agree, but I realize I am biased because my career has been based on the production and sale of copyrighted material. Allowing people to download it for free completely ruins the business.
SOPA is an attempt to rein in some of this copyright infringement because, as we all know, people in the information business rely on copyright protection.
I don’t know if SOPA will pass, and even if it does, I don’t know if it will solve the problem. I tend to doubt it. It may curb it somewhat, but it won’t solve it. People will find new ways to “share” copyrighted information.
If you ask the anti-SOPA crowd how people who rely on the sale of content are supposed to survive in that kind of environment, they say we have to come up with new business models.
So, what kind of a business model can work in a world where you can’t sell your content because everybody downloads it for free?
Well … you could put advertising right in the middle of your content. I don’t mean a little space add over on the side, or an ad on page 4 of a 6-page report. Those things can be removed. I mean that the advertising is built into the content in such a way that it’s inseparable.
Here’s a ridiculous example that occurred to me this morning …
Yesterday all my truffles seemed so far away,
But Fed-Ex delivered them in a day ….
Or, in the next Jason Bourne movie, he’ll be wearing a Coca Cola hat, and he’ll give us a little discourse on why he prefers Smith and Wesson handguns. And in the next piece of fiction you read, the main character will not only remove his shirt, but tell you wear he got it and why he prefers that brand.
Hey … make your choice. Either pay for content, and protect the rights of the people who sell it, or expect all content to become a commercial.
Not that this is a complete solution, by the way. It may work to some extent for consumer products, but what kind of product marketing are you going to do in high-end, expensive legal and compliance services?
Anyway, that’s where we’re headed. If the producers of content can’t rely on sales for revenue, they’ll have to go to an all-advertising format, and it’s going to be more invasive and annoying than commercials. (At least at first. It’s possible that some people will learn to do it well.)
While I agree that something has to be done about rampant piracy of content (speaking as someone who works in the same field of selling content) it seems that SOPA is like trying to kill a mosquito with a bazooka. There has to be a middle way here that protects the content producer while also helping the consumer.
As an example, once Apple made it easy and relatively cheap to purchase digital music a la carte, I immediately started purchasing songs from them when I would have skipped purchasing a full CD if that was the only option. Rather than a strict DRM model now, Apple actually watermarks your music with your AppleID so that dis-incentivizes me from sharing that music outside my family. That seems like a reasonable trade-off to protect them and allow me the convenience of purchasing a la carte songs.
The major problem I have with SOPA is that it seems to be the product of media companies circling the wagons around out of date business models that a solely built on scarcity. Every consumer ends up being treated like a potential criminal who is just dying to give the content to others when in reality, most consumers just want an easy way to purchase the content once and consume it on multiple devices and form factors. If I purchase a movie, why shouldn’t I be able to watch it on my TV, desktop, laptop, iPad and/or iPhone?
I don’t generally purchase e-books most of the time because there is such a messed up network of permissions surrounding whether or not I can lend the copy to someone else to read after I’m done with it. The way I read a book is to read it and lend it to friends and family who might be interested so we can discuss it. It’s my book. I didn’t purchase a single user license to it (although you can argue that the form factor of a physical book implies at least a single concurrency usage). I certainly don’t like the fact that if my wife and I have Kindles attached to two different Amazon accounts, we can’t even share the same book in most cases.
The world of content is changing rapidly and has already changed – SOPA seems (from what I understand) to be trying to put the genie back in the bottle and punish everyone rather than trying to help content providers find a reasonable way to sell the content to the consumers who are ready and willing to pay them.
Good thoughts, and I agree with a lot of what you’re saying.
It seems like the main problem with SOPA is the lack of review when copyright infringement is alleged against a site. (Which seems like a very fixable problem.)
Is there anything else that stands out to you?
This is an example of a company’s (whose technical opinion I trust on a matter like this) stance on SOPA/PIPA: http://www.thoughtworks.com/news/press-release-thoughtworks-technology-advisory-board-statement-sopa-pipa-18-january-2012
@Greg Krehbiel
The measures attempt to change the very backbone (DNS) of the internet in ways that are not well thought out for one.
That is a valid concern. Most of what I’ve seen in the anti-SOPA rants has been “content wants to be free” stuff.
Yeah, “content wants to be free” is shorthand for “I don’t want to pay anything”. That’s stupid – but breaking the internet and creating a situation where people’s sites can be shut down because a user in their forum linked to a copyrighted picture is overkill.