Back to the drawing board for the proposed US Stop Online Piracy Act

Proof that SOPA and PIPA are not needed?

US legislation aimed at foreign websites that pirate copyrighted material stalls, amid widespread protests and divisions among those whom it's supposed to protect

SOPA and PIPA withdrawn, the argument's not over
by Eric Jackson

Two laws that were proposed in the US Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate, were withdrawn from consideration on January 20, with SOPA sponsor Representative Lamar Smith (a Texas Republican) pulling his proposal from consideration in search of changes that might get the support of "a wider consensus" a few hours after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (a Nevada Democrat) decided to delay a cloture vote that might have ended a filibuster on PIPA, which was proposed by Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy. Both bills would have given the US Justice Department the power to order any website or search engine to remove any link to any foreign website suspected or alleged to contain copyright infringing material. Such orders would be given and enforced without prior court proceedings at which the site with the link, let alone the foreign website sought to be blocked, would have a chance to be heard. The supporters of SOPA and PIPA had been set back over the previous days by President Barack Obama's statement in opposition to SOPA and an international January 18 "Blackout Day" protest that involved Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Wired and many other websites going offline. Here in Panama, Okke Ornstein's Bananama Republic website joined the blackout.

Among those supporting SOPA and PIPA were the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Business Software Alliance and a number of unions representing musicians and people who work in the movie industry. Their basic complaint is that the fruit of their labor gets put online and distributed for free without their permission, costing them a lot of money.

However, there were breaks in the industry ranks. For example, renowned British musician Peter Gabriel blacked out his website as part of the protest. And if some of the major television networks liked SOPA and PIPA, the Online News Association and the American Society of Newspaper Editors added their voices to the protest against the proposals. Facebook did not join the blackout, but its founder Mark Zuckerberg did state his objections to SOPA and PIPA. There are all manner of arguments about how the government's summary powers to block Internet sites can be abused, and such actions as attempts to copyright the song "Happy Birthday" and to patent genetic material taken from human blood samples added some strange hypothetical situations to the debate.

In a column for Truthout, Economist Dean Baker put the stakes in perspective:

While this revolt against the entertainment industry’s effort to rein in the web was inspiring, there is a real issue at stake. It is getting ever harder for creative workers to get paid for their work.

This is seen most clearly in the music industry. Sales of recorded music in the United States dropped from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $7.7 billion last year. If sales had kept pace with inflation and the growth of the economy they would be over $23 billion today.

Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of this money stems from the work of small number of performers who are promoted by the major entertainment companies. The vast majority of singers and musicians get almost nothing from copyright protection.

Baker's solution is to replace copyright with other methods of rewarding people for their creations. That might be a hard thing to sell in the peculiar ideological climate of the United States, but Canada has long subsidized its actors and musicians, and in the United Kingdom there is a tax on television sets to subsidize the BBC. In any case, resistance to any greater government strictures on the Internet is also now a political fact of life on the US landscape, and people who create and own intellectual property outside of the United States are looking at the American debate, often with mixed feelings.

The Panama News consulted a number of musicians here and abroad --- the most famous of whom did not answer --- about the proposed US legislation and the issues involved. We asked, in English or Spanish as appropriate, these questions:

As a musician who could be affected by US "anti-piracy" laws like the proposed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act), and the existing laws such as were used to shut down the New Zealand-based website Megaupload:

1. Do you support or oppose laws that prohibit music file sharing on the Internet?

2. Do you support or oppose worldwide regulation of the Internet by US laws?

3. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) says that about this subject it defends the interests of musicians. Do you believe that this is really so?

4. What do you think that musicians need to protect their interest in profiting from their own creations in this age of the Internet?

Following are some of their responses.

Rómulo Castro, leader of Grupo Tuira and the composer of the Grammy-winning song La Rosa de los Vientos:

I do not believe in any of these "legal" attempts to limit freedom of expression and communication. Behind the euphemism of defending "rights" what is hidden is an attempt by transnational communications companies to continue profiting at the expense of artistic creators. What should be promoted are initiatives aimed at safeguarding the rights of the artists and laws to create incentives. So long as art is regarded as a mere market, its scope and its potential to contribute to a fairer society will be weakened.

Todd Perkins, who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, plays the bass in bands around that area, has toured Europe and elsewhere and does sound engineering for other musicians:

I have used file sharing quite a lot myself (mostly for testing out audio software before buying) so I'd be hypocritical to oppose it. I haven't shared music the way that apparently the masses do though, and it's a problem. It costs a good deal of cash to create an album of songs (or even one), and if the possible return is undermined then the investment of time and cash and energy is much less rewarding. This is perhaps more true of the Big Corporate Labels that create these overproduced (and INSANELY expensive) recordings, like for instance someone like Beyonce. I heard a radio documentary on the making of her newest release and the amount of money per day was mind-boggling. And even with a lot of file-sharing she'll be getting her paycheck.

For the people like me in the Indie/DIY world it's a similar or different problem --- where before the few sales we'd have would be the difference between making another record or not, or possibly buying an improved recording device, or perhaps just buying some groceries, when people casually help themselves to your creation it's a little sadder. But these days the emerging paradigm is that your CD is not a product anymore really, it's a calling card, a promotional device. It's something you give away on your website as free downloads in return for an email to add to your list, in the hopes that the downloader in question will perhaps come out to your show, that you'll theoretically be paid for. Well, the only PROBLEM with that paradigm is that music venues are getting thin on the ground and are paying much less than they were --- indeed, some aren't paying at all! So what's left to make a few bucks to feed to bulldog so you can afford to continue playing? Some people point to the Merch Table, where they sell T-Shirts, Posters and CDs (for those who still like CDs). That used to be the ancillary earnings that we'd buy gas and rent hotel rooms with.

Alex Reyes, leader and "Slim" of the Panamanian band Shorty & Slim:

The Internet is just too easy to get free music --- I don't know what else to say.

Varoon Anand, the son of an Indian diplomat and an actor, musician and video director and producer now living in India --- among other things working as a stage actor --- who lived and practiced his arts in Panama for a number of years:

I oppose laws of any kind to regulate any aspect of the Internet. The Internet is vast and uncontrollable, as it should be. It allows a person from any corner of the globe to share his idea with the entire planet. Quite often we will get people whose ideas we disagree with. More often, we simply get people with ideas of no particular relevance, discussing the vagaries of some television celebrity, a move that most of the supporters of the SOPA are happy to encourage. But it's the ideas we disagree with that cannot and should not be controlled. If a Pakistani nuclear scientist lays out the framework for constructing a nuclear bomb on the Internet, is he also held accountable for a reader going out, constructing and detonating such a device? The truth is, the problem is the desire to commit evil, not the availability of the resources to commit evil.

As an artist, I can understand an organization wishing to protect its intellectual property: a song. The question is how? A new artist will seek to have her music played in any possible place, free of charge. Before file sharing, radio was the means to do it. As a young man whose parents couldn't afford to pay me $15-20 to buy a music CD every week (and certainly didn't wish to encourage the spirit of possession of music by consumption), I had to listen to the radio on my old "two-in-one", waiting for my current favourite to come on on Casey Kasem's Weekly Top 40, and then record it onto an audio tape, which would find its way to my walkman. If the quality wasn't terrible then sometimes a friend would asked to borrow the tape and make his own copy.

Even earlier, when I was about four years old living in communist Romania (around 1984), my brother was incredibly enamored of popular music. I had no idea about anything, but I was fascinated by the technology. Every night, my brother would turn on the tape recorder and have a tape he had borrowed from a friend. Back then we listened to anything that could be smuggled in. A lot of Abba, Kraftwerk, Furious Five, and especially Michael Jackson.

Playing the songs when bedtime came and the lights went off was my brother's way of helping me fall asleep. Giving me fuel to create a dream, sound and words creating images in my imagination, because I didn't know how to dream just yet.

We kept this going for years. When we moved to Spain we became obsessive. We started what we called the Munnu-Punnu collection, an amalgamation of both our nicknames. He did all the work, I did all the listening to the tapes. But we stopped listening to them at night after my brother brought home Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds. I was so terrified of the story of Martians invading earth, that I could no longer take it at bedtime. We had more than 20 60-minute tapes.

When we moved to Saudi Arabia three years later those tapes became what kept us sane and free. In Saudi, friends would give me tapes they would smuggle in too, and I became notorious for never returning anything borrowed, because my brother had gone to boarding school and I didn't like doing the recording work without him. But what I couldn't understand even at that age was: Why, in a country where almost all forms of music and pleasure were banned, did they sell blank audio tapes? What exactly did they think we were going to record on them?

I think that's my perspective on file sharing. It isn't a question of opposing or supporting it. The technology to share files exist, the reasons are myriad, but it's the fact that we can do something is why we do anything.

The SOPA isn't very different from telling me not to play a cover of Led Zeppelin of my guitar, or to confiscate the neurons that play Neil Diamond. The SOPA would give intellectual property rights owners unprecedented control over other unrelated private enterprises.

How could I possibly support worldwide regulation of ANYTHING by the United States government? The United States can speak only for itself, and, in most cases, cannot even do that --- being a mess of laws that are [local] vs. state vs. federal. Thankfully, the beauty of the Internet is that no one nation can dictate how it functions. It does not have a center, therefore no one place to regulate it from. The US government can only dictate what service providers will allow their users to access. I think this is similar to banning offensive books in some parts of the Bible Belt. Books that are deemed offensive are burned, but the knowledge gained from them can't be.

I think that [the RIAA] can claim to defend the interests of musicians, but in order for this to be true I would hear far more talent on popular formats. The singer Adele equaled a record for completing her 17th week at the top of the Billboard 200 Album chart. The last time the record was set was in 1993, by Whitney Houston for The Bodyguard. This sort of dominance is more indicative of a lack of competition than it is of sheer talent. People are still listening to music, and music is immortal, so its quantity is always increasing. The amount of music available to a record label is always increasing. So, in terms of assets, a company is always growing. So why aren't there more new artists? Radiohead made their last album available free on the Internet, they only asked that users pay whatever they thought fit. They did this because they believe the role of the recording industry should be to nurture and develop new talent, not profit blindly off successful artists. So the RIAA is looking in the wrong direction.

Artists, first and foremost, need to protect the identity of their product. I'm sure you can recall several instances of musicians protesting politicians appropriating songs for campaigns. That's the sort of thing they want to protect, the misrepresentation of their product. Few are worried about their audience having their songs in whatever form. Even Metallica, who famously fought against Napster, turn a blind eye and welcome their fans recording bootlegs at their live shows.