Recently hundreds of websites went dark, limiting user access, and/or altered their main page appearance to try to bring awareness to their users of some pieces of legislation before the houses of the US congress. The response from their users was tremendous and pushed many legislators who had previously supported these bills to withdraw that support. I've been on a bit of a rant about it myself recently in my Twitter feed and in the flow of words coming out of my mouth to friends and colleagues. Surprisingly, although many internet users got the message that these laws might hurt the internet most don't understand how or why they should be upset beyond reddit told them to be. This stuff seems complicated, I'll grant that, but they really aren't all that tough to understand. I'll lay them out here as best as I can.
Let's talk a little history. Hollywood. Why is it in Hollywood? When motion pictures were invented they were an incredibly innovative technology; an innovative technology that could make people a lot of money; an innovative technology to which Edison owned the patents. People didn't want to pay Edison money to make movies so they moved their movie making endeavors to California where the patent laws of the time did not apply. They were stealing. They were patent pirates. They found a way to steal so they could profit from further innovating on an innovation.
Hollywood and the entertainment industries that have sprung up around it, including the music industry, are extremely profitable for the captains of these industries. The captains of these industries have sought, rightfully so, to defend their rights to continue making money from them. Unfortunately, they have a history of trying to crush or stifle other innovations in defense of their originally ill-gotten gain. The VCR, cassette tapes, DVD burners, CD burners, DVRs, and a plethora of digital formats throughout the development of the personal computer and the internet have each and every one been vehemently attacked by the entertainment industries before eventually being adopted, at least in part, by them. They are the distributors of entertainment and they want to maintain that control. They don't want you to be able to distribute their entertainment, rightfully so, but they also don't want you to be able to distribute your own creations without them getting a slice of the earnings.
In this sense, the internet is a massive threat to them. The internet allows the content creator to cut out the distributing and managing middle man. It also allows people to take their products and distribute them for free but that's only part of their problem. What happens to their business model when musical acts like Radiohead or Girl Talk and performers like Louis CK take their products directly to market? What happens to their business model when these same acts say 'pay whatever you want or nothing' or 'take a look or a listen and if you like it, then pay me'? What happens when new, undiscovered acts or performers take their creative content to Soundcloud or to YouTube and give it away in exchange for exposure? Their business model falls to pieces and they have to restructure it. They hate that. They do not want to do that. They've set up a giant pyramid of people who all get money from the content others have created. These are executives and administrators. They are not artists or performers. They are not content creators. If the pyramid falls, they are boned.
Isn't this way over-simplified? YES. WAY. But I'm not going for tl;dr here. There are tons of people who may or may not be working behind the scenes to create content: producers, writers, sound/recording engineers, etc. When Radiohead or Louis CK work, those people work too.
Lobbying and lobbyists aren't inherently bad things. In fact they were originally and still can be a pretty good thing. You want your business needs to be seen and considered by your elected legislators. That's great. But lobbying in many cases has grown into something else, something more than a consideration of needs; a quid pro quo agreement. I scratch your back with massive campaign donations and support and you write laws that benefit me, even if it's to the detriment of your other constituents. Enter the MPAA and the RIAA.
The MPAA and RIAA are not the entertainment industry. They do not pay content creators and are not hired by content creators. They are lobbyists hired by the captains of the entertainment industry to protect the interests and profits of themselves and their shareholders. Whether this has any affect on the profits enjoyed by the actual content creators is arguable. I'm not going to argue it. I just want to point out the straw man argument that is often used in the media to defend the actions of these groups. These people are far separate from the actual content creators.
The MPAA and the RIAA versus the internet. Right now, right this very second, there are laws in place that allow the US Justice Department to take domestic internet sites offline permanently for violation of copyright laws. Yes. It's true. This is not a new thing. Also, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), entertainment companies have the right to directly remove copyright violating files from domestic websites (a right they severely abuse but, again, I'm not going into that).
So what's the deal with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)? Why do the MPAA and RIAA want these laws so badly and why would they hurt the internet? The laws currently in place only apply to domestic websites; websites with a .org, .net or .com domain name in the Domain Names System (DNS). The DNS allows websites to use a URL (uniform resource locator) or 'website name' instead of their IP address (a string of numbers). When the Justice Department takes down a website, they remove it from the DNS. It's still there, you just have to use the IP address to get to it. You can't take a website down unless you go physically cut the cord. But for most web users the website is effectively gone if it is no longer listed in the DNS.
These laws expand the takedown power of the US Justice Department to websites with any URL suffix. Think bit.ly or redd.it. It greatly expands their takedown powers. Yes, the companies whose copyrights have been violated still have to get a court order to have entire websites taken down. But wait, there's more. What these laws also do, and what is a great threat to the internet as we know it today, is to require Internet Service Providers and all websites to police their own customer and users. That means that if you decide to share a copyrighted work on YouTube, your ISP and YouTube have both committed a crime.
If I make a video of myself dancing to a Lady Gaga song and I place it on YouTube, YouTube has to recognize that I've done so, decide if I've committed a copyright violation against Universal Media Group and take down my video. If they do not, YouTube has committed a copyright violation and could be taken offline. You see, it's too much of a pain in the ass for UMG or the RIAA to sue me individually for copyright infringement. It's much easier to threaten the company I've used to commit that infringement (if that example would count as infringement at all which a court would have to decide and it costs money to take me to court so...).
What if I record a song on SoundCloud and call it "Poker Face"? It's a completely new creative work that does not have any semblance at all to Lady Gaga's song of the same title. Soundcloud can't take the time to listen to every song users upload and they can't take the risk of being shutdown so they delete my song and maybe my account. My ISP sees the upload of PokerFace.mp3 and cancels my internet account and I can't even go online anymore. I've just been completely censored and the courts, UMG and the RIAA didn't even have to get their hands dirty. Friggin' nefarious, no?
How does that affect the internet as we know it? Why would any website or ISP allow you to share any file whether you created it, own it, or not, if the threat of allowing you to do so is going out of business? What is the internet if not a way to share content you've created: websites, bits of open-sourced code, photos of your vacation.
Is pirating of copyrighted works a problem? Yes. It has been since people have had the ability to make a copy. Is destroying the greatest innovation since the printing press the answer? No. No, it is not.
What can you or I or anyone else do about it? Not a lot, realistically, except make your voice heard as often as possible. Your congressperson is getting buckets and buckets of lobbyist money to support their re-election campaigns and keeping their jobs is a pretty big interest for these folks. Keeping your job as a congressperson takes TONS of money (that's a rant for another day). You can't even begin to fight money with money in this case. You've already lost that battle by a huge margin. What your congressperson can't ignore is millions of constituent voices. They want to but they'd look super corrupt. They are, after all, supposed to representing you and what you believe. Right? Right.
