Christina DesMarais has a summary of the bill introduced by Congressman Darrell Issa to replace SOPA:
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) introduced H.R. 3782, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, the same day as an Internet protest when a number of high-profile websites such as Wikipedia went dark. Issa says the new bill delivers stronger intellectual property rights for American artists and innovators while protecting the openness of the Internet. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has introduced the OPEN Act in the U.S. Senate.
OPEN would give oversight to the International Trade Commission (ITC) instead of the Justice Department, focuses on foreign-based websites, includes an appeals process, and would apply only to websites that “willfully” promote copyright violation. SOPA and PIPA, in contrast, would enable content owners to take down an entire website, even if just one page on it carried infringing content, and imposed sanctions after accusations — not requiring a conviction.
There really is a need to find a balance here. Ripping off artists because you don’t want to spend the money to purchase their goods, but you feel you have the right to enjoy the fruits of their labour, is wrong. I am sure we have all done it to one degree or another, but there are too many people out there who feel it is their right to download something and not pay for it. And others feel it is their right to share something that they paid for.
Comment by Dwayne — January 23, 2012 @ 12:11
There is a problem there, although the pro-SOPA organizations have used totally unrealistic numbers for the losses due to piracy. Politicians, for the most part, took the RIAA and MPAA numbers as baseline, not as padded estimate by rent-seeking lobby. There are even artists, authors, and musicians who strongly believe they’re better off because their work gets pirated: it gets to a larger audience, many of whom will either buy the work or otherwise support the creator of the work.
I don’t think it’s as simple as “piracy bad: shut down internet which enables (some) piracy”. The potential economic impact of SOPA/PIPA are orders of magnitude greater than the provable economic losses due to piracy.
Comment by Nicholas — January 23, 2012 @ 15:07
Like I said, a balance. Any artist who strongly believe they are better off because their work gets pirated can just post it up for free then. You don’t make much money that way, but if it make you feel good, I guess that’s their choice. And I know that the whole RIAA and MPAA numbers are full of crap, but the fact is that there are too many people out there who buy nothing, they just take, and for some reason they think that is just fine when it isn’t.
I don’t even begin to agree with SOPA or PIPA but there does need to be something. I’m no expert, I have no suggestion even.
At least the record companies and movie companies actually have a cost involved. The ones that are starting to piss me off are the publishers and the cost of ebooks. I could live with paying $8 for a paperback. They had to print it, box it, store it, and ship it, but now they just get the author to upload the book, format it and store it on digital medium and then charge the same dead tree prices. I would rather pay an author $8 direct and download the book from their website than pay $8 to Amazon, Kobo, Apple or some other middle man, and see the author get a small cut. The more authors that see that, the cheaper the books will become as the middle man gets squeezed out. I imagine that the bandwidth for an author may become an issue, but storage of digital files, meh, minor costs there.
Comment by Dwayne — January 24, 2012 @ 02:01
No, I don’t mean artists who have other sources of income. These are folks who earn all or most of their income from their artistic endeavours (Cory Doctorow is perhaps the best known author in this category). They feel that the “lost” income from piracy is desultory or imaginary (that is, the people getting “free” copies would never have obtained the work if they had to pay for it), and that the increased reputational value for being better known more than compensates for the “lost” sales.
I can’t fault you for being upset about the ePublishers current pricing policies. There is no justification for charging the same (or, as a few of them tried to do early in the game, more) for an electronic copy as they do for a physical copy. And that’s setting aside the whole issue of digital locks / digital rights management.
I’m a serious reader: I own thousands of books (literally). Until the digital rights get sorted out so that the purchaser actually gets fair treatment and unimpeded access from their purchase, I will not buy electronic copies of books. I have a few dozen public domain books on my iPhone, but no commercial books that have DRM.
Comment by Nicholas — January 24, 2012 @ 09:57