Jan 21, 2012
Dear Senator Franken,
PIPA and SOPA (House version) come about because big money interests like media companies buy political votes like human beings buy groceries at the store. Please stop wasting valuable political airtime on issues that are meaningless to regular humans and only of interest to non-human people like corporations and such.
Instead please put forth a constitutional amendment banning all direct and indirect contributions of money and time to politicians by every person who is not a human being. Also, please require full and prompt disclosure upon the Internet of ALL direct and indirect contributions of money to politicians and political campaigns. Do these things and you will get my vote again for sure. Such an amendment is the ONLY way to put a stop to political corruption and time wastage on issues like PIPA.
In your email to me:
From: Al Franken
To: Lyno
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 6:36 PM
Subject: Let’s talk about intellectual property
You say “there are millions of Americans whose livelihoods rely on strong protections for intellectual property: middle-class workers – most of them union workers – in all 50 states, thousands of them here in Minnesota, working in a variety of industries from film production to publishing to software development.” Adequate protections are already in place in laws going back decades. As you well know, the Internet is a game changer regarding distribution of copyright works. The recent Justice Department shutdown of Megaupload.com proves my point and affirms that PIPA’s trifling with the Internet is entirely unnecessary. The recent Washington Post article “Federal indictment claims popular Web site Megaupload.com shared pirated material” proves that existing laws are adequate.
Just so you know, I find the obfuscating phrase “intellectual property” to be intellectually offensive because it presumes that copyright, patent, and trademark laws are somehow similar, which they are not. I prefer when copyright is not lumped into such a meaningless phrase and is named directly when it is being discussed.
Thank you for your consideration of this matter.
Lyno
Indeed. This is the latest in a long line of media companies’ attempts to manipulate the free market by sounding alarm bells over perfectly legitimate technology that happens to be out of their control.
Remember the flap over Betamax? Representatives for the MPAA testified before Congress that the sales of video tape machines must be regulated in order to protect the investment of movie studios in their ‘intellectual property’ (a term i also despise, by the way).
Audio cassette recorders, MP3, CD recorders, and now the Internet at large. The list will continue to go on. The bottom line, in my opinion, is that businesses engaged in creating so-called ‘intellectual property’ have crunched the numbers and decided that it’s less expensive to invest in litigation and lobbying efforts to attempt to stifle technology which exists outside the sphere of their immediate control than it is to invest in the routine re-tooling necessary to stay abreast of the technological times.
The music industry was dragged to MP3 kicking and screaming, and now, for the last several years, MP3 sales are outpacing CD sales. Apple is the world’s leading music retailer. The public relations fiasco created by the vicious tactics employed in order to try to halt the march of progress has caused irreparable damage to the industry. There have been enormous opportunities for expansion into these emerging, Internet-enabled markets, but the industry has been too busy throwing a tantrum to get on the bus.
Now, here we are again: These industries have been focusing their resources on rear-guard maneuvers to try to protect the ‘intellectual property’ which is already in circulation, rather than investing in supporting innovation which would enable the sorts of access to their products which consumers increasingly crave. Panic ensues.
Consumers have spoken, and they’ve said that they’re willing to violate copyright laws in order to have their music the way they want it. Seems to me that the smart play would be to go to the people who have the money you want and figure out how to get them to come off of it as efficiently as possible. Instead, the politics of our present economy dictate that the you attempt to beat your consumers about the head and force them to give up their money the way you want to receive it.
SOPA and PIPA may be off the table following last week’s unprecedented online backlash, but they’re not dead. I believe that we’ll be seeing their siblings soon enough. I also believe that I’m being more realistic than cynical in predicting that those siblings are going to be the same tired media industry arguments, re-packaged to attack the latest trends in content delivery.