Raven's Bluff

SOPA- the Stick for Copyright Corporations

Anyone who has been relatively active in the blogosphere (and the internet in general) the past few weeks has probably already heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a morally duplicitous bill masquerading as the latest in a long line of well-intentioned but ultimately misguided attempts by the American legislature to regulate the post-internet world in the same fashion as the decades before it. Being a 21^st century piece of American legislation, the bill is quite complex and intentionally vague in its wording, but among other things, it

·         Allows the Department of Justice to sue websites outside of US jurisdiction for copyright infringement

·         Gives the Attorney General the power to demand that American ISPs and other internet-related corporations block offending websites for their customers

·         Increases legal penalties for unauthorized streaming of content to a felony

Needless to say, this bill has huge implications for the future of the internet, but the potential consequences of this bill have been discussed better and in greater detail than I can hope to achieve in this short summary. The effects of this bill, while horrifying, aren’t the reason I’m writing this article. Instead, I hope to explain why the supporters of this bill are pushing so hard to restrict Americans’ access to the internet, and what it will take to stop it.

The whole problem has its roots in the fundamental conflict at play in internet regulation bills like SOPA—namely, the old corporate model of entertainment distribution vs. the new internet model. To clarify: when I say “entertainment distribution” I refer not only to the means of sending media (games, books, music, movies) to stores, theaters and broadcasters, but also the means of producing said media, and the means of controlling who has access to that media.

The Golden Age of the Corporate Entertainment Industry

Before the internet, exposing media to a widely dispersed audience necessitated the existence of large corporate structures to disseminate the media as a product to their consumers. This enabled artists of all stripes to have access (as part of these corporate groups) to audiences orders of magnitude larger than anything they could achieve independently.

The Beatles could not have played Ed Sullivan if it weren’t for all the distributors at EMI shipping their records overseas

And when the corporations used the profits from distribution to invest in better production tools (such as recording equipment, studio musicians and in-house producers for record labels) to help their artists create better work, both sides profited. The symbiotic relationship of individual artists and corporate conglomerates also benefitted consumers- corporations were able to offer lower prices for their artist’s work than independent artists could. It’s a basic economic principle- the larger the demand, the closer a firm is able to sell a product at cost, because the increased demand makes up fixed expenses of creating the product. The size and breadth of people a corporation could sell to made it economically profitable to sell the same product cheaper.

Even before the internet entered widespread use, however, this corporate entertainment structure had its problems. The lopsided balance of power between corporation and artist meant that many companies abused their artists by demanding they sign over copyright, produce media they didn’t want to, and took the majority share of the profits from their creative work. The dissatisfaction with this power structure contributed to the independent film studios and alternative music labels of the early 1990s, but Corporations simply bought out those independent studios. The internet had to present an alternative to the corporate structure that could not be acquired or bought out.

The Internet Revolution

The internet has fundamentally changed that power structure between artists and corporations by changing how we view demographics and potential audiences. With internet, people with little to no geographical connection can all be grouped by common interest. Artists suddenly had a powerful tool to find and connect with their audience without the help of a corporation. One good example is the online-only “television channel” Channel Awesome, built around the talents of Doug Walker, who makes his living doing video reviews of nostalgic films to his mid-teens to 30 year old fanbase. With the old corporate structure, that demographic would have been so niche it would not have merited the attention of large corporations. With the internet these fans, while spread across the world, can still visit the Channel Awesome page 114,00 times per day.

The ability of the internet to uncover previously niche demographics didn’t go unnoticed by corporations, however. Internet culture was closely associated with geek culture as a whole in its infancy, and the so-called “Geek Revolution” of the 00’s in American popular culture was largely due to corporate focus on reaching that larger-than-we-thought geek demographic. The flip side of exposing these new fanbases was that it became possible, even easier, for artists to make a living without the help of the old corporate structure, by marketing directly to fans, usually through large content-hosting sites like YouTube, DeviantArt, Blogger, Soundcloud, etc. And if an artist could make a living without needing a corporation to promote them, then the corporation no longer has a means to turn a profit in the new industry.

The Mess of Modern Copyright

The root of this conflict between the old and new power structures is Copyright, because Copyright is and always has been the way Corporations make money off of artists. A little background: Copyright was originally designed to foster more creative work by artists in society, as an (initially) 28 year period where society as a whole (through the force of the government) agreed to give an artist exclusive control over the use of their work and the money that work earned to fund them making additional works. G.C.P. Grey gives an excellent explanation of how and why Copyright changed from its reasonable roots to the monstrosity it is now here, but in short: once corporations began to take control of Copyrights from the artists they worked with as part of their contracts, Copyright stopped encouraging artists to make more work and instead encouraged corporations to exert more control on what competitors and independent artists created using copyrighted material as a foundation.

This isn’t suspicious at all…

There’s a jaded saying about Copyright law in the USA- Copyright is always equivalent to how many years ago Steamboat Willie came out, plus 5 years. The worst example of corporations clearly changing copyright law to net further exclusive profits was the Copyright Act of 1976, which changed Copyright duration to the life of the author plus 50 years. To quote Mr. Grey:

“Who needs incentives after they’re dead? Dead is literally the point where no incentive in the universe can compel you to write another screenplay. Because you’re dead.”

So who gets the benefits from Copyright law extending after the author’s death? The corporation who controls their Copyrights, and they use those rights to prevent anyone else from using the Copyrighted work to foster further creativity.

Consider, for example, the phenomenon on YouTube known as “AMV”. Short for “anime music video”, it consists of taking clips from Japanese animation and using them to create an ad-hoc music video to a song or any other audio clip the creator chooses to use. Like most creative endeavors it suffers strongly from Sturgeon’s Law, but very entertaining and amusing works have been created from this synthesis of copyrighted material, such as AMV Hell, which had multiple sequels, some of which clocked in at over an hour. On YouTube, where the average video length is 4:12. The original version of the video (which was later removed by YouTube due to MASSIVE amounts of copyright claims by record labels and film studios) had in excess of a million views, and its hour long sequel has nearly 3 million views right now.

Did AMV Hell require no creative effort to assemble? Of course not, unless you also believe that Dr. Dre albums require no creative effort, or Led Zeppelin albums. Is Fistful of Dollars worthless because it can be accurately summarized as “Yojimbo in the American Southwest”? Replication and synthesis of other artists’ work is how we create new work. After all, Everything is a Remix, in one shape or another. Hell, in the 1950’s, during the resurgence of Manufactured Pop Music in the Tin Pan Alley style, a common threat for one label to issue another if they were stingy with distribution rights for a single was “I’ll cover you!”, wherein the label found a similar-enough singer and completely replicated the track to put on shelves alongside the competing label’s single. The irony of these same Corporations decrying works like AMV hell is astonishing.

The internet is humanity’s greatest tool in accelerating the pace of this synthesis of creative work. I have heard the idea proposed (and two hours of Google-Fu couldn’t find it, so for now consider the claim unsupported anecdotal evidence) that after the 1990s, which was easily the longest cultural decade in the US (from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the 9/11 attacks in 2001), widespread internet use resulted in accelerated “half” decades, ending either after George W. Bush’s first term in 2004 or after Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Despite being only fifteen years old in popular culture (give or take), the internet has created heaps of cultural memes, styles, speech, etc. and the number seems to be growing every year.

Of course, most of the new content on the internet is being created from existing, Copyrighted material. Like I outlined above, this isn’t a new practice, but combining the Everything’s-A-Remix principle with the fast and easy audience creation potential of the internet results in people becoming internet-famous off of Remixed work. And to the old guard, to the corporate power structure struggling to adapt to this new tool that makes public dissemination of creative work nigh instantaneous and dirt cheap, the one power they still retain over this new paradigm is Copyright.

Those Damn Dirty Pirates!

There is one other aspect of the internet I haven’t touched yet, and it’s ironically the source of the name for SOPA—online Piracy. To bring up that fundamental economic principle I mentioned earlier:

The higher the demand, the closer the product will sell to the cost of producing one more of it.

Now what, exactly, is the cost of copying an .mp3 file? I’d guarantee it’s far less than $0.99, which is how much a legal .mp3 costs in most markets. How much does the bandwidth to stream a Netflix movie cost? Much less than the $4.25 it would cost to rent at a physical movie store. Cracked.com (I know it’s not a journalistic site, this isn’t the usual humor column, it does raise salient points about digital goods) wrote an article on how digital media, within the day-to-day human understanding of the world, essentially becomes a post-scarcity product. When the user has the ability to flawlessly replicate your file without the need for specialized tools or enormous amounts of capital, and can distribute it instantly across the globe, scarcity of goods no longer applies in the same way it did for a copy of a CD Bootleg sold behind concerts in the 1980’s.

Therefore, what is the real market value of a CDs worth of music? Close to $0, because it costs essentially nothing to produce another copy of that music collection. I could, on my computer, replicate the entire remastered Beatles catalogue in lossless format, and apart from the opportunity cost of my time (and miniscule amounts of electricity and the depreciation it causes to my computer), it would cost nothing. Judging by the fact that “People still buy music?” is a common joke amongst youth today; I’m not alone in my assessment of the market value of music, and similar logic applies to movies, video games, eBooks, etc.

There are a number of potential models people use to make a living through digital goods and combat piracy, but the potential solutions aren’t germane to the point at hand: namely, that punitive measures to punish pirates have a strong tendency to punish everyone but pirates. Using the classic dichotomy of carrots vs. sticks, the Corporate Entertainment Industry is relying entirely on sticks because they become less relevant when they use carrots. Forcing the government to impose artificial scarcity to compensate for an industry that can no longer compete alongside its former employees (the artists), who are finding ways to use carrot-based measures such as “Free digital goods, but pay extra for physical goods/performances/extras” to make a living off their fanbase.

In the end, the American Congress (and the American people at large) faces a key decision: do we create a Forced Artificial Scarcity economy on our country to give more power and influence to the already powerful and influential, or do we reform Copyright (their last remaining tool) to its original intent, and foster more creative works in this country? Unfortunately, unless the decision to reform Copyright Law gains serious traction and political weight, an Internet-regulating Censorship bill will pass the Congress, whether it’s SOPA or another, potentially more devastating bill in the future. The Corporate Entertainment Industry simply has more power in this regard.