The Key Problem: Context
As someone who always tries to see both sides of a debate, I understand where people are coming from that support these bills. The internet is a medium through which it is more easy than ever before to facilitate theft of intellectual property such as music and movies, and it makes sense that a good way to prevent this kind of theft is to eliminate the people, (or in this case, websites,) that make the theft possible.
However, in order to successfully propose government legislation that addresses the issue of internet piracy, you must be very careful in the way you put forward your proposal in order to avoid stifling the beautiful open forum of ideas that is the internet. In fact, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what the right way to word this legislation would be, I don’t even try to take the problem on.
Theoretically, SOPA would help creative individuals to protect their property on the internet. In reality, SOPA is a shotgun that threatens to actually wipe out creative expression and freedom online.
The Real Solution: Competition
Despite what certain stakeholders in the situation would have us believe, the only solution is not to shut individuals and websites out of the internet that might have potentially broken copyright laws. Especially when the process for deciding who the offenders are is questionable at best.
The alternative to using government/legislation to solve these issues is to go to the market place. At the end of the day, big-name creators of content who are at issue with “pirates” have the resources to provide content in a way that is more desirable to consumers than content that is shared illegally.
In order to prove that this is true for the majority of internet users, one only needs to look at the large-scale use of legitimate paid services such as iTunes, and even the use of “illegitimate” paid services that make profits off of facilitating piracy to see that users of the web are willing to pay for access to content online.
Instead of insisting on doing business with consumers your way (through more traditional means), why not work to give them what they want? Companies that support SOPA and PIPA should invest their time, effort and finances towards developing product offerings that trump “product offerings” from people who steal things such as music and movies.
At the end of the day, in a free-market economy such as America’s, companies whose business model does not compete with that of others will not succeed. The solution is not to change the scope of the market you hope to compete in, but instead to change the way that you approach that market. If you refuse to do this, I’m not willing to sacrifice the internet to save you.
UPDATE: I’ve just read here that Lamar Smith has pulled the bill. This means that whereas SOPA is not actually dead, we’re moving in the right direction! We now mustn’t forget how close we were (and still are) to losing our freedom on the web, and that certain companies are still moving to use the wrong means to solve their business problems.
Great assessment of the situation and I have to agree. Resorting to anti-competitive behaviour is never the right solution
With your suggested approach in mind, I end up asking “What is preventing people from changing how they compete?”
Do you feel like the cost of abandoning the old ways and implementing new ones is just too high-risk? That it’s a paradigm shift that itself carries a cost? People like to talk a lot about risk these days in either good or bad terms, but very few actually seek it out. If only because it might threaten their projections.
In that sense, maybe anyone with something to sell shouldn’t be so fixated on maximizing sales. Instead they should focus on increasing the intrinsic value of their product or service and marketing more effectively (adopting new paradigms).
Seems like much less of an uphill battle compared to what’s considered normal nowadays.
Thanks Alex!
As for the reasoning behind the choice of lobbying over marketing-optimization, you and I can only speculate to what goes on in the heads of the “bigwigs” of the motion picture and recording industries. However, if I were to hazard an educated guess, it would be that these behemoths simply would not be able to compete as well in an entirely internet-delivered media world.
Take the example of the recent rise of independent music or “indie”. The internet, through websites such as MySpace, has facilitated the rise of many bands that are popular today only because their albums that had been produced on small independent label became popular through the internet. It is a trend that will most likely be duplicated in the movie industry in the very near future, due to the recent improvements in the production capabilities of small affordable DSLR cameras.
As Chris Anderson’s book “The Long Tail” taught us, the internet gives consumers value through offering a plethora of products that each offer value to a smaller number of consumers. This is a model that works well for independent record labels that give a small number of people what they want, but doesn’t work as well for bigger movie producer who rely on the ability to make millions of people want to watch their movies through marketing.
Are there holes in my theory about this? Absolutely. Could a major movie producer make their product more affordable for consumers online, take viewership back from pirated sources, and make a business shift towards a more modern model that will negate the need for former legislation like SOPA? Absolutely.
So I guess at the end of the day, you’re technically right. It’s probably a matter of risk that’s influenced by the points I’ve made above about more nimble suppliers of content. But hopefully, former legislation like SOPA will keep getting rejected, and we’ll see what happens when the bigger companies are forced to take the risk!
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