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I've been thinking on and off about SOPA lately. I think most of you are aware of the "Stop Online Piracy Act" by this point, though why I'm assuming that I'm not entirely sure. I still haven't seen a single f'ing mention of it in any major news outlet - not the BBC, not the Guardian, certainly not the Metro, and I don't think it's that different in the US than it is here.
And oddly? It's this silence that makes me as virulently anti-SOPA as I am.
Look, it's like this: SOPA gives the power to have entire sites shut down on just a suspicion of copyright infringement. No investigation, no innocent-until-proven, and certainly no time to take down that single bit of offending material. Whole site can just be shut down until it's sorted out whether the site owner is guilty of copyright infringement or not. That could take months.
Imagine doing that to LJ. "Oh, someone posted a screencap!" or something equally stupid. Or Tumblr. Or Twitter. Or any of the ways that we as information-loving folks have actually spread word about things like SOPA (and, prior to that, the NDAA) in the first place. Without those, most of us would have no idea about this sort of shit, because the big media franchises sure as hell aren't covering it, no matter how newsworthy it is.
We don't really need evidence of how far into each other's pockets the news media corporations and the politicians are at this point. While journalists were once proud of being the ones who broke Watergate wide open, the folks who get employed in Big News these days are generally the ones who accept and revel in the fact that a large percentage of the people seem to care more about a politician's genitalia and what they're doing with said genitalia than policy. The only ones who seem to actually care about the shit that matters, instead of just the shit that sells, are the ones who aren't being paid for it - or at least, not getting paid well. The internet is not just for porn, or for piracy - it's the only place freelancers have left to actually talk about actual substantial news ... well, at least that isn't the Podunk Times out of Nowhere, Middle America, anyway.
So the media corporations follow the spin of their pet politicians, who in turn pass legislation that serves the interests of their media corporation meal ticket, and it's this cronyistic cycle wherein we're all fed a bunch of crap that claims to be independent journalism but isn't and no one ever sees the Truth (a la Spider Jerusalem) ever again. There isn't even a hope of triangulating on the truth without bloggers poking their noses into every available bit of information out there and comparing stories. And you just know that blog host sites are going to end up going down the next time someone wants to pass some disgusting bit of legislation like the NDAA, if SOPA passes. And it'll take forever to get them back up and by that time, there'll be a nice shiny new violation of civil liberties reducing the Bill of Rights to toilet paper yet again with no hope of any input from ... y'know, the people. Because Fox News and CNN weren't going to talk about it and the independent blogging news folks couldn't, so no one would know.
Maybe this is paranoia talking, but ... seriously. When no newspaper or news site will mention SOPA at all but it's clearly everywhere online ... I am leery of a bill that will let people shut down entire websites on mere suspicion. I live in a world that looks more and more like Mira Grant's "Newsflesh" every day (just without the fun of zombies) - the bloggers are the rising stars of real journalism because they still seem to care about truth and freedom of expression, rather than just panem et circenses. And what happens to them when the internet is subject to such immediate, 'guilty until proven innocent' censorship as SOPA allows? It has unfortunate side effects.
There are so many other ways to fight online piracy without this. Most of them involve the companies in question revising their business models to fit the 21st century. Universal release dates, no region-specific crap, and maybe letting us transfer the media we've paid for to whatever format we see fit without crippling our computers with crappy DRM code. I imagine that TV channels would make way more money letting people subscribe to an online on-demand viewing channel (with the added bonus of ad revenue) than they ever have from ad revenue from things aired on TV and subscription charges from the cable channels. But even if the folks at Warner or Disney or wherever else actually realised this (which they probably don't because the people making these decisions probably still blame the VCR for fucking everything up for their market share), I don't think it'd fly. Too many elements of government, US or otherwise, have too vested an interest in silencing mainstream media sources to let the ability to censor the internet without looking like they're doing so slide so easily.
Put it to you like this: David Seaman had his Twitter account suspended because of OWS and NDAA-related tweets - and while Twitter seems to have tried to explain that, he's not alone. Just because you're paranoid, and all that...
People can talk about "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" all they want. But the implications of all this, viewed in the light of things already happening, look pretty fucking scary to me.
And oddly? It's this silence that makes me as virulently anti-SOPA as I am.
Look, it's like this: SOPA gives the power to have entire sites shut down on just a suspicion of copyright infringement. No investigation, no innocent-until-proven, and certainly no time to take down that single bit of offending material. Whole site can just be shut down until it's sorted out whether the site owner is guilty of copyright infringement or not. That could take months.
Imagine doing that to LJ. "Oh, someone posted a screencap!" or something equally stupid. Or Tumblr. Or Twitter. Or any of the ways that we as information-loving folks have actually spread word about things like SOPA (and, prior to that, the NDAA) in the first place. Without those, most of us would have no idea about this sort of shit, because the big media franchises sure as hell aren't covering it, no matter how newsworthy it is.
We don't really need evidence of how far into each other's pockets the news media corporations and the politicians are at this point. While journalists were once proud of being the ones who broke Watergate wide open, the folks who get employed in Big News these days are generally the ones who accept and revel in the fact that a large percentage of the people seem to care more about a politician's genitalia and what they're doing with said genitalia than policy. The only ones who seem to actually care about the shit that matters, instead of just the shit that sells, are the ones who aren't being paid for it - or at least, not getting paid well. The internet is not just for porn, or for piracy - it's the only place freelancers have left to actually talk about actual substantial news ... well, at least that isn't the Podunk Times out of Nowhere, Middle America, anyway.
So the media corporations follow the spin of their pet politicians, who in turn pass legislation that serves the interests of their media corporation meal ticket, and it's this cronyistic cycle wherein we're all fed a bunch of crap that claims to be independent journalism but isn't and no one ever sees the Truth (a la Spider Jerusalem) ever again. There isn't even a hope of triangulating on the truth without bloggers poking their noses into every available bit of information out there and comparing stories. And you just know that blog host sites are going to end up going down the next time someone wants to pass some disgusting bit of legislation like the NDAA, if SOPA passes. And it'll take forever to get them back up and by that time, there'll be a nice shiny new violation of civil liberties reducing the Bill of Rights to toilet paper yet again with no hope of any input from ... y'know, the people. Because Fox News and CNN weren't going to talk about it and the independent blogging news folks couldn't, so no one would know.
Maybe this is paranoia talking, but ... seriously. When no newspaper or news site will mention SOPA at all but it's clearly everywhere online ... I am leery of a bill that will let people shut down entire websites on mere suspicion. I live in a world that looks more and more like Mira Grant's "Newsflesh" every day (just without the fun of zombies) - the bloggers are the rising stars of real journalism because they still seem to care about truth and freedom of expression, rather than just panem et circenses. And what happens to them when the internet is subject to such immediate, 'guilty until proven innocent' censorship as SOPA allows? It has unfortunate side effects.
There are so many other ways to fight online piracy without this. Most of them involve the companies in question revising their business models to fit the 21st century. Universal release dates, no region-specific crap, and maybe letting us transfer the media we've paid for to whatever format we see fit without crippling our computers with crappy DRM code. I imagine that TV channels would make way more money letting people subscribe to an online on-demand viewing channel (with the added bonus of ad revenue) than they ever have from ad revenue from things aired on TV and subscription charges from the cable channels. But even if the folks at Warner or Disney or wherever else actually realised this (which they probably don't because the people making these decisions probably still blame the VCR for fucking everything up for their market share), I don't think it'd fly. Too many elements of government, US or otherwise, have too vested an interest in silencing mainstream media sources to let the ability to censor the internet without looking like they're doing so slide so easily.
Put it to you like this: David Seaman had his Twitter account suspended because of OWS and NDAA-related tweets - and while Twitter seems to have tried to explain that, he's not alone. Just because you're paranoid, and all that...
People can talk about "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" all they want. But the implications of all this, viewed in the light of things already happening, look pretty fucking scary to me.