I am sure you are all well aware of the SOPA / PIPA proposed legislation by now, and today’s “internet blackout” movement that major sites such as Reddit, and Wikipedia have undertaken. Many of you may utilize these websites on a daily basis and are now up in arms against these proposed legislations to regulate the way citizens of the United States share and access content on the internet… But I would like to give you some “industry insight” if you will.
I’ve had a rather lengthy discussion on my Facebook wall this morning with some friends and acquaintances who are so strongly against SOPA/PIPA without reading the official statement from the White House on their opposition of the (editors note: what I’ll call) functionality of the bill.
If you don’t have the time to read the full statement, i’ll give you the run down. They don’t agree with the restrictions that would be put in place by implementing the proposed rules, but they DO agree that we need to find a solution to put an end to all this online piracy. Who wouldn’t agree to that? Every person has access to almost anything they desire in the form of entertainment, at no cost to them outside of the fee their ISP charges each month.
We could argue that the box office hasn’t really been effected, television has adapted to the lack of viewers by offering streaming versions of their shows online with their accompanying advertisements, software companies are still making money, and that people are still purchasing books or eBooks on Kindle… But that’s not really the point or what people are worried about.
People are worried about being able to share their own content, or access other peoples content from around the world. The way the bills are currently written WOULD -NOT- STOP THIS, but it might restrict the sites that you can do it on… So that means it’s really not hitting the mark at all.
So let’s dive in a little deeper to what I feel will actually come into play in all of this, as a child of the internet and someone who has been in the industry (even the dark side of piracy) since he was entering his teenage years…. And not what is speculated.
I feel that whatever they decide on can’t change the architecture or structure of the way the internet “works”. What it can do is apply restrictions for US citizens; much like sites such as Pandora, Spotify (US Version), Hulu etc. already do for those who are NOT citizens of the United States. People won’t be able to access certain sites that are flagged by the government without a work around, and yes… There are alreadyworkarounds in place in case SOPA passes.
So what do I personally think will actually happen?
Basically, in my opinion of course, this will all come down to blocking out the mainstream torrent sites, other file sharing sites, and the ability to pay for and have your information remain anonymous for over-sea’s hosting/server farms if you live in the United States. There will also be a new law in place that will allow the offenders to NOT be protected internationally (which will open a whole new can of worms), or at least not allow US Citizens to be protected.
Right now the biggest problem is they can’t LEGALLY track down the people who run the offending sites, nor can they shut down the servers in Chechnya and other foreign countries who have their own laws in place to make their citizens which own the hosting businesses (for simple namesake that’s what we’ll call them) have no liability for their customers actions, or how their service is being used.
To summarize it plainly, this will only change how the piracy part of the internet works; nothing else.
Think Napster / Limewire / Bearshare / Whatever past program that was used and the transition into Torrents being the main way piracy is conducted on the internet. Now, think about it for a moment… Will whatever law that gets put into place stop people from innovating a new way to share whatever the heck they want to share? Not bloody likely.
There are far too many clever and innovative people in the world that will develop a new way to do the same acts of piracy that has been done on the internet since it was created… It will just take some new learning from those who participate in it.
A little bit about me: I’ve worked in the industry since I was 14 years old, I ran (and recreated the entire game) one of the most popular private servers for the first MMO, Ultima Online. With running that server, I was tracked down with cease and desist letters because I was stupid enough to host it on Canadian soil. The letters contained threats, but they had no way to prosecute me back then cause I was Canadian, and I was 15. But oh boy did they want to!
Now don’t take this the wrong way, this was one of the first projects of it’s kind and the goal was to see if it could be done. We wanted to innovate, and change something that already exists, like open source projects are today, and we were successful. It was just far before the time of it being an acceptable practice, even though I’m sure we could have got permission from Origin to do what we did… As long as we did not make it available to a userbase… But when you go seeking fame and glory, you sometimes break the rules.
We never made a dime off the hundreds of hours of work we put into the project, in fact, we invested quite heavily into the hard costs of bandwidth back then… And we were still treated as criminals
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