"Just consume, don't produce, don't share": SOPA/PIPA Links

"Just consume, don't produce, don't share."

from Bob Lefsetz:
The content industries don't want a distinction between what's legal and illegal, that bit them in the ass already, with the Home Recording Act of 1992, wherein it was declared legal to make your own mixtapes, even share them. That horrified them. So they changed their game, they decided to go after the sharing itself.

That's what SOPA and PIPA are all about.

And the way they're going to achieve their goal is to put the burden of policing upon Google and Yahoo and the other portals/search engines that provide links. If the cost of policing is high enough, they'll just outlaw the practice. Entirely.

There's a great analogy at the beginning of this clip. A story about a bakery in Brooklyn that allowed customers to bring in their kids' drawings so they could be imprinted upon cakes. Only one problem, kids like to draw cartoon characters, the ones they see in movies and on television. And this is copyright infringement. So what did the bakery do? Instead of having someone make a judgment as to the legality of each drawing, they outlawed the practice entirely. Now you can still get an image on your cake, but it has to be one of the authorized ones the bakery provides.

But maybe your kid drew a fish because he likes fish and he's never even seen "Finding Nemo". He can't get his fish on a cake because the bakery is afraid of infringement, they're not even gonna make that judgment. Google is gonna outlaw links to all sharing because it's just too damn expensive to figure out what's legal and what's illegal. So you'll just consume pre-approved content, manufactured by the usual suspect music and movie companies. You can't create your own because it might infringe and Google doesn't want to make the wrong decision and it takes too much money to make a decision, so you can create your music, but it won't be findable, the search engine can't take that risk.

And if you think the above is blown out of proportion, you don't understand how the content companies think.

They want control. The Internet is their worst nightmare. It allows anybody to create. And under the rubric of preventing you from mixing up your content with theirs, they want to outlaw sharing completely, they don't want you making music and movies, they just want you to buy theirs. This is the concept of scarcity that made them so much dough, this is the past they're trying to jet us all back into by crippling the Internet. As Clay Shirky says in this video, they want to "raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs."

They think we're dumb. They've got no idea the Internet is all about smart. They want us to believe in the nincompoops on "The Jersey Shore", not some egghead with degrees who's actually thought about all this and isn't in it for the short term money and fame.

TED talks are a burgeoning resource. The brand stands for intelligent insight. Take the time out to watch this presentation, you'll get it, you'll be horrified, you'll send it to all your friends.

P.S. You might be unable to do this under SOPA. For fear that you might be sharing copyrighted material, your ability to share at all could be crippled, because it would cost too much for the linking service to determine whether it's legal to share the content or not.

LINKS GALORE BELOW:

"Why SOPA and PIPA Spell Trouble" from The Pop Cop

"google's "end piracy, not liberty" slogan not only makes piracy real, but places it in opposition to liberty...

the anti-SOPA campaign exists to make you think that piracy is real."

 What Happens to MegaUpload’s Grammy Winning CEO Swizz Beatz?

Anonymous DoS Attacks. 1. 2. 3.
"The Evil New Tactic Behind Anonymous' Massive Megaupload Revenge Attack" from Gawker

Megaupload Take Down. 1.2.3.
 "Megaupload Accounted for a Quarter of All Corporate Traffic--More than Dropbox" from Gizmodo

"RIAA Is 'Deeply Grateful' to Justice Department for Thwarting Megaupload's 'Sinister Scheme'" from Gizmodo

"In Fight Over Piracy Bills, New Economy Rises Against Old" from NYTimes

File Sharing Is Now A Religion from Vice

"Inside Megaupload's Megamind: Kim Dotcom's Playboy Bunnies, Russian Nuclear Vessels, And Private War On Terror" from Fast Company:
-A profile of Megaupload's Boss, "Part Sean Parker, Part Kevin Mitnick, with a whiff of Notorious B.I.G."

Breaking News (21/1/2011):

"Internet Wins: SOPA and PIPA both shelved" from Ars Technica
"Megaupload Assembles Worlwide Criminal Defense" from CNET

Even some Republicans "get it":

Culture Bully's Top 15 Mashups of 2008

This is Culture Bully's 15 Top Mashups of 2008. The fact that 2008 was the year that remix culture broke into the mainstream --for better or for worse-- places these tracks at the heart of the zeitgeist

.zip archive here. Go to Culture Bully for a track by track breakdown.

Holiday Cheer: RIAA to Stop Suing Music Swappers

Yes, you read correctly. The RIAA is not suing individual on-line music swappers anymore and is abandoning it's practice of 'mass lawsuits'.

Read about it here on p2pnet. Recording Industry vs. The People has an exhaustive collection of links to blogs and news stories about this. RIvsTP is also cautious in celebrating too quickly as it reports that the RIAA's claim of not having filed cases 'for months' is false.

Something to think about before going overboard with too much enthusiasm is the ominous statement that the RIAA, while dropping the individual lawsuits, is "looking for more effective ways to combat copyright infringement". While dropping the lawsuits is undeniably a clear indication of the record industry's complete disconnect with society and their lack of vision for a new business model that adapts itself with the changed rules on the ground, there's a feeling that the 'more effective ways' they are talking about involve getting ISPs to do their dirty work for them --remember the cases of disappearing blog posts and the strange letters that services like Blogger have been sending to the blogs they host? Are the ISPs about to be turned into rogue enforcers of the law? Certain service providers have already agreed to help the music industry and their quick denials about blacklisting file sharers is deeply suspicious. Bob Lefsetz is aware of the problem but he is too happy dancing around the bonfire of the majors to be concerned. Let's hope he's right.

Foxtrot

Click on comic to enlarge

The Public Domain

James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. It available for download from Yale University Press here.

"Musical styles change over time and so do their techniques of appropriation. Sometimes musical generations find their successors are engaging in different types of borrowing than they themselves engaged in. They do not always find it congenial. It is striking how often musicians condemn a younger generation’s practice of musical appropriation as theft, while viewing their own musical development and indebtedness as benign and organic. … [Sampling] is a different kind of borrowing than the adaptation of a chord pattern from a gospel standard to make an R&B hit. But which way does the difference cut as a matter of ethics, aesthetics, or law?"

This is good material for people working on copyright and appropriation for their final papers. Chapter 6 ("I Got A Mashup") is especially pertinent. Read it together with Matt Mason's "We Invented the Remix" chapter from The Pirate's Dilemma posted a few weeks back. Chapter 6 is here, from the 'annotatable' version on the website of Boyle's book.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto

Here's the trailer for another one of them remix manifestos. Starring, yes, Girl Talk...

From the project website:
In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil's Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.
A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.