Hi... uh... oh hey, there's a tumbleweed.
Well, anyway, I noticed I haven't blogged in a while--heck, almost a month, so I figure it's about friggin' time. What's on my mind, though? Well, there's this thing called SOPA that I want to talk about. Why? Well, everyone else is talking about it, and I'd like to put in my two cents.
First thing's first, I want to make something abundantly clear. I am not supporting SOPA, but I'm not exactly opposing it either. No, what I want to write about is the hysteria surrounding it. I'm a fan of some internet critics--Linkara, the Angry Video Game Nerd--and there's a lot of concern that it might make their job impossible. And when I say, "a lot of concern," I mean, everyone's going bat-shit crazy and some seem to basically making stuff up.
The prevailing wisdom seems to be this: that HR 3261 (as with everything else, you can look it up on
http://thomas.loc.gov) makes it illegal to post anything that might have copyright material onto YouTube, or you'll be found guilty of piracy just as surely as if you'd gone to a concert, taped it, and sold it on the street. I argue, "well, what about Fair Use?" and while I hear some saying it "somehow" (his word) "tramples over" it, without explaining how.
Basically, what the bill aims to do is prevent torrent pirates from uploading movies for people to buy, or download for free. If they do, they could do hard time. And community service. Is that so bad? Well, I don't think so. I suppose someone could, but it's a far cry from something that would criminalize posting a review of something and using a few clips on YouTube in Fair Use, yet that's what people are putting forth.
Speaking of Fair Use, a lot of what they do in those online reviews is NOT necessarily covered by Fair Use (playing a snippet of a song for comedic purposes) though that may be more of a gray area than anything else. In any rate, I read section 201 a number of times, but it never occurred to me to read both that and the extant version of Title 17, Section 506. Very little changes, and IF uploading a fan video of something constitutes criminal infringement in the current law, it does so with or without SOPA.
Okay, so whatever, it's not as bad as people make it out to be. Why, then, am I so worked up? Because this mania over SOPA exemplifies four of the biggest problems I see facing our nation today.
1) Hysterical griping. Obviously, politicians are always trying to scare us. Shame on them. But I honestly believe--and have for a long time--that there's a lot of people who, to use good ole fashion showbiz talk, love to be scared. I mean, look at some of the comments in the above link. See how many posts are written to the tune of, "ARGH!! THEY'RE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY OUR RIGHTS!!! BLARGH!!! ANOTHER TWO WEEKS AND WE'LL BE NO DIFFERENT FROM CHINA!!! " It's like they're living out Orwellian fantasies or something!
2) People not doing basic research and somehow spouting off about a given law. Seriously: I honestly find it hard to believe that some people have read this bill based on some of the comments I've seen. I feel like a friggin' lawyer doing what people get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do: study the law! This isn't the only example, although the one that I feel REALLY tears our nation apart despite being a non-issue is one I'll keep to myself. But when it comes to SOPA, you can tell, you can just tell, the whiney babies have no idea of what they're talking about.
3) The blurring of privileges and rights. This not only pertains to people who say to themselves, "you know what? I'm gonna upload some old episodes of Growing Pains onto YouTube," but to people who watch it. Someone in some comment box said it best, when he pointed out the harsh reality of the FBI warnings on tapes and DVDs. But what about people who watch them? Well, I'm taking the fifth on this issue, but I don't condemn people for downloading torrents or watching stuff on YouTube and we'll leave it at that. I DO, however, condemn the attitude that all of this is your God-Given right.
In
this ridiculous article, the author complains, "I don’t understand the entertainment companies’ end game here. They’ve gone beyond obtuse to straight up maniacal. Do they think if they manage to shut down every bit of copyright infringement on the internet, that sales are going to suddenly skyrocket? Do they think people have some secret horde of cash that they’ve just been waiting to blow on DVDs and CDs, but haven’t because of The Pirate Bay’s existence?" Um, no, it means that if they don't want to pay to watch the movies or play the video games, then they shouldn't see them. This is in the context of him whining about how the government can put him away for linking to some YouTube video which doesn't appear to be any more true now than it was before, but that's beside the point. The point is that too many people think--as Cracked.com's John Cheese put it--that "entertainment has no monetary value." A lot of people borrow CDs from friend and tape them, or tape a movie off of the TV. After-all, it's not like a store has a piece of inventory that's unaccounted for. Right?
But the question remains: if you don't have to pay, why should anyone else; and if they don't, why should they keep making movies and music? After-all, the main reason they make all this stuff is money. But that's not gonna sit well because of...
4) The vilification of the profit motive. Now, I'm not going to get into a much bigger problem with THIS trend, because--well--it involves something popular that I don't like but don't want to badmouth because I don't want to alienate certain people. What I am going to say is that corporations making too much money isn't the problem: the problem is that SOMETIMES they CHOSE to layoff people who may need the money. That sucks, but it doesn't help when people want a system where corporations DON'T make money so they HAVE TO lay people off. But back to the hysteria surrounding SOPA.
As I tried to explain before, film studios, record companies, etc. make entertainment for money. We're supposed to hate that because it means they lose their integrity, overuse gimmicks, ruin potentially great works of art with executive meddling, etc. Yeah yeah, it sucks. Except for all the times it doesn't suck because even ideas the studio had weren't that bad (who cares if Marty's mom's name is Meg or Lorraine?), or may have even been GOOD (sometimes censoring a gruesome act of violence can lead to a haunting image that improves upon just seeing someone getting killed) but for people who want to be artists or are tired of Hollywood formulas, it can be frustrating.
Cry me a river!
If you think all these movies suck so bad because of the corporate decisions being made, you're entitled to your opinion, but then you shouldn't watch them at all. Why do you want to? To find out how bad it is? Great: why not pony up the dough? "No, that's just what they want." No shit. So if you don't want to give them what they want, why even acknowledge its existence?
The bottom line is this: the people making these over-the-top, histrionic tomes about SOPA don't seem to know what the bill says, or what current law says anyway. Again, where is there support for the claim that it eliminates Fair Use? What's the problem if someone can't upload a fan video of some Beatles song? And most importantly, how is that any different from the way it is now?
