Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by and David Moon Patrick Ruffini David Segal
Tags: Bisac Code 1: POL035000
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record producers, now dominant in the music industry, turned to fight the emergent radio broadcasters, who had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious and tried to block radio from playing records without explicit permission from the artists. Their argument was, “When we used technologyto appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.”
Flash forward another forty years: along came cable TV, which appropriated the broadcasts that were sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.”
And then only a few short years later, in 1976, Sony’s VCR arrived, instigating a landmark lawsuit from the cable operators and the studios. The eight-year legal battle, concluding with the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling, featured anti-VCR briefs that fundamentally went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.”
Sony won, and fifteen years later, it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. And so the copyright wars continue.
Internet advocacy group Fight for the Future formed during the heat of the PIPA battle and quickly produced a web video to educate Internet users about the bill. Their widely watched video noted the history of copyright holders and industries suing to undermine disruptive new technologies. The screencap above captures a scene in the video reminding viewers about past lawsuits against both Betamax VCR’s and MP3 players.
Historically, copyright has worked as a form of industry regulation. The rule of thumb that copyright uses to figure out if you’re part of the copyright industry is whether you are making copies. This made perfect sense in the past century. Anyone who was pressing a record had a million-dollar record factory. Anyone printing a book had a printing press, a bunch of skilled printers, and a building to house the whole operation.
Equating copying with industrial activity made sense when copying was hard. The problem is that over time, computers have made copying exponentially easier and cheaper. Before the Internet, it was very difficult for the state or rights holders to discover that copies—possible offenses—were being made. Therefore, there was almost no pressure on intermediaries to police copyright on the behalf of the rights holders. No one asked the companies that sold school notebooks to ensure that fanfic was never scribbled in their pages. No one asked art teachers to police their students to ensure that they were staying on the right side of copyright in their figure-drawing classes.
But all this changes in an era of Internet-scale intermediaries, networked communities, and automated notice-and-takedown procedures. Flickr or Facebook becomes the preferred way for kids to share their drawings with one another. Fanfic.net becomes the preferred place for fanfic authors to share their work with one another. Technically, the companies providing this service are “making money off copyright infringement,” but no more than the mall food court near the local high school makes a few bucks off the students who gather there to show off their infringing art while eating lunch.
During the SOPA/PIPA fight, many Internet users feared the bills would lead to rampant litigation and unreasonable enforcement actions by copyright holders. During protests in New York City on January 18, 2012, many of them created witty signs to explain the dangers.
It’s impossible to
Flash forward another forty years: along came cable TV, which appropriated the broadcasts that were sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.”
And then only a few short years later, in 1976, Sony’s VCR arrived, instigating a landmark lawsuit from the cable operators and the studios. The eight-year legal battle, concluding with the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling, featured anti-VCR briefs that fundamentally went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.”
Sony won, and fifteen years later, it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. And so the copyright wars continue.
Internet advocacy group Fight for the Future formed during the heat of the PIPA battle and quickly produced a web video to educate Internet users about the bill. Their widely watched video noted the history of copyright holders and industries suing to undermine disruptive new technologies. The screencap above captures a scene in the video reminding viewers about past lawsuits against both Betamax VCR’s and MP3 players.
Historically, copyright has worked as a form of industry regulation. The rule of thumb that copyright uses to figure out if you’re part of the copyright industry is whether you are making copies. This made perfect sense in the past century. Anyone who was pressing a record had a million-dollar record factory. Anyone printing a book had a printing press, a bunch of skilled printers, and a building to house the whole operation.
Equating copying with industrial activity made sense when copying was hard. The problem is that over time, computers have made copying exponentially easier and cheaper. Before the Internet, it was very difficult for the state or rights holders to discover that copies—possible offenses—were being made. Therefore, there was almost no pressure on intermediaries to police copyright on the behalf of the rights holders. No one asked the companies that sold school notebooks to ensure that fanfic was never scribbled in their pages. No one asked art teachers to police their students to ensure that they were staying on the right side of copyright in their figure-drawing classes.
But all this changes in an era of Internet-scale intermediaries, networked communities, and automated notice-and-takedown procedures. Flickr or Facebook becomes the preferred way for kids to share their drawings with one another. Fanfic.net becomes the preferred place for fanfic authors to share their work with one another. Technically, the companies providing this service are “making money off copyright infringement,” but no more than the mall food court near the local high school makes a few bucks off the students who gather there to show off their infringing art while eating lunch.
During the SOPA/PIPA fight, many Internet users feared the bills would lead to rampant litigation and unreasonable enforcement actions by copyright holders. During protests in New York City on January 18, 2012, many of them created witty signs to explain the dangers.
It’s impossible to
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