Above is a clip from This Week In Tech #332. Leo Laporte and Nilay Patel break down the SOPA/PIPA debate and have an intense conversation. Both agree that SOPA is terrible legislation and will create more problems than it could ever solve. However I completely agree with Leo that piracy is not actually a problem here.

Protecting copies is an old and obsolete way of thinking about creative property in the digital age. Once something becomes bits it is infinitely copyable and transmittable at the speed of light. It’s simply the nature of digital media. There is no solution to piracy, it’s the reason why retail stores build a certain amount of loss from theft into their yearly projections. This legislation is old media’s attempt to make technology work the way they want it to work. It’s the government essentially saying “bad technology! Don’t work the way you’re supposed to work.”

I feel, as is too often the case, that the underlying issue here is greed. Some people would say that one potential dollar lost to piracy is too much. Leo makes so many good points in the clip above, one of them being that no one in Hollywood is going hungry; 2010 was actually a record year for the film industry. Counting money you could have made but didn’t as being rightfully yours seems fallacious and problematic to me. True, maybe Louis CK could have made $10 million instead of $1 million, but it’s also possible that absolutely no one would have bought his recording if it cost more.

It’s clear there is no easy answer to this situation. One can say however, that a complete paradigm shift is in order. The market has already shown time and time again that people will pay for good content (e.g. Netflix, Spotify). Wouldn’t it be nice if “consumers” became community and creators become real people who share what they’ve created, taking care of their communities while their communities, at the same time, took care of them? Sounds nice to me.

You can speak out by signing google’s online petition to stop SOPA/PIPA.

Tags:copyriht proectionintellectual propertyinternet piracyleo laportePIPASOPATwit