The Latest Web Battle: SOPA and PIPA vs. The Internet

Ten years after Napster shook up the music industry with the first major peer-to-peer music distribution site, the latest battle over digital media rights with the SOPA/PIPA legislation looks to be every bit as controversial, complex and important for the future of both content creators and distributors.

It’s interesting to note that on the content creation side, the players haven’t changed that much - industry titans like Comcast/NBC Universal, ABC, Sony, Viacom, Warner Bros. and so on have lined up to support the “Protect IP Act” (PIPA) and the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA).

But on the other hand, the content distributors have come a long way since Shawn Fanning hacked together Napster in his Northeastern University dorm room.  Google and Facebook (among the largest opponents of SOPA / PIPA) are arguably more powerful and better funded than those same media heavyweights that crushed the fledgling music-sharing site in 2001.

The idea of the web as an open and free community sharing space has truly come to pass in the years since Napster’s landmark case.  Tremendous innovation has resulted from the open collaboration and access to information that the web now provides to global citizens.  Defending that free and open access from the potential fallout of the SOPA/PIPA legislation galvanized the tech community in a way that has rarely been seen before.

It’s clear that at some level the creators and promoters of these bills are trying to solve a real, very concerning problem of online piracy.  The involvement of the musical performing rights organizations BMI and ASCAP, for example, is understandable as their goal is to protect their artists.

However, the fundamental flaw in this legislation is that like so many efforts by government in the tech space, a lack of a comprehensive understanding of what they’re regulating leads to rules that simply don’t do what they’re intended to, no matter how well-intentioned their creators might be.  One net effect of this legislation, for example, would have been to penalize content sites that (even inadvertently) host copyrighted content that their users have created; this would have made it nearly impossible for social media sites to operate.

While the purported purpose of the bills is protecting the goods and services of the entertainment industry, their net effect is censorship.  The overall philosophy of the web community is that web content should be open and free in order to preserve the freedom of information to which all people are entitled.  This idea that information should be available to all, without censorship, is shared by many leaders in the technology arena, including giants like Google and Wikipedia, both of whom were at the helm of the recent protest that led to the “Internet Blackout.”

The Blackout movement was hugely successful in generating buzz and getting the attention of media outlets and citizens alike.  In fact, the campaign was hailed as "the most widespread online lobbying effort ever coordinated by Internet entities," by ABC News.

So why all this “coordinated lobbying?”  This movement wasn’t just about protesting legislation.  Very little coordination was really needed, since these bills contradicted values that are practically universal in the tech community.

At Orion, we actually have a foot in both worlds, as both creators and distributors of content.  We create copyrighted content for our clients, including brand identities, multimedia and unique marketing copy.  Yet we also help our clients to develop websites that encourage sharing and communication among their brand advocates, which often leads to that same copyrighted content being mashed up, altered, tweaked and repurposed by those fans.

So we often find ourselves helping companies come to terms with the fact that their fans are part of their brand story, and that their messaging is expanded and made more powerful and compelling by the involvement of their users, in spite of the rampant copyright infringement they admittedly commit in the process.  As a musician and card-carrying BMI member, our CEO has strong feelings about piracy.

“As an artist, I feel that protecting the intellectual property rights of musicians, actors, and other creative people is incredibly important,” says Orion Creative Group CEO, Harley Orion.  “But in this case the proposed ‘cure’ is worse than the disease.  That’s why we join the many technology companies in opposing SOPA and PIPA in their current forms.”

Now, a week after the blackout, we find ourselves with a better outlook on what congress will propose for future internet regulation, as both bills have been shelved "until there is wider agreement on a solution,” according to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith.

The Internet Blackout movement was clearly a huge success, and it reminds us of how truly pervasive a force the web has become over the past decade.  Perhaps in the end that’s the best argument for why our political leaders need to take a step back and actually become fully educated on the social, economic and technological realities of the web in 2012.

We hope that the search for a real, effective solution to online piracy will continue, but that this problem will be solved with the involvement and assistance of the tech community that is best positioned to help that effort truly succeed, with a minimum of collateral damage and impact to the majority of us who use the web as a force for good.

Amber Douglas
Social Media Account Manager