Some followup thoughts on my SOPA post
The best thing about writing for me is that it helps me figure out what I really think about things. And one of the very best things about doing it on the web is that others can collaborate, disagree, tweak, suggest, and generally help think through things even better. So after a couple of days of Friday’s SOPA post rolling around in my head, I think I have a tighter point of view now that I wanted to write down. (There were some great tweets, mails, comments & posts in reaction to what I wrote. Super thoughtful & useful.
Here are a few specific starting points, then I’ll get to my main point, which is that we (a technologically-oriented US, at least) are not well set up for the future in terms of how we evolve tech policy. Not a new thought, but I think the SOPA situation may be putting us in a worse spot.
But first 3 starting points and a personal observation:
1. SOPA+PIPA are awful bills. No way around it. They over-reach, they circumscribe civil liberties, and they mostly will not work. They shouldn’t pass, and we should do whatever we can to keep that from happening. They’re the latest in a long line of legislation that looks like this: reducing freedoms in a misguided attempt to protect us from a different big bad. They’re so numerous in US history they hardly need listing here.
2. Existing industries are always oriented towards self-preservation. No exception here. But there’s a funny thing that happens: the most progressive companies of today who become successful and dominant will become reactionary in the future, oriented themselves towards self-preservation. Same as it ever was. And you can see it even in the current situation — the companies who are most outspoken are the modern Internet companies: LinkedIn, Mozilla, Zynga, Google, etc etc. Mostly on the sidelines are the most progressive technology companies of the past decades, even including Apple. So this is not, fundamentally, a techie v content type of issue at all, but more of a progressive v conservative technology issue.
3. We do have existing laws and norms. A number of folks argued that content owners just need to accept that pirated goods are a viable alternative and need to learn how to compete with them. I’m wholly unpersuaded by that point of view. Or, rather, I believe we do have existing laws that govern how we behave. It’s pretty clear (to me at least) that content businesses will need to evolve, and many interesting ones already have. But that’s something for a lawful market to decide, not for anyone to thrust onto content owners & creators.
And then a personal observation: I was actually a little nervous writing about SOPA last week because of the tone of the conversation to date. I felt like it might actually provoke harsh negative reaction and somehow brand me as “SOPA-friendly” or against the web. That’s a weird thing for me to feel, as I think my web & open culture bona fides are pretty well established at this point between my work with Mozilla, PCF, Code for America, and now Tumblr, etc etc. That by itself tells me that there’s something wrong about how things are going.
Okay, so given all that as a context, here’s my main point: no matter what outcome we get to with respect to SOPA+PIPA, we’re in a bad spot going forward.
I think much of the legitimate frustration on the Silicon Valley side of the fence is that there seems to be no way to have a meaningful conversation about this stuff in ways that we know to be productive. It’s happening at this point with some guy who doesn’t seem to understand technology having his staff & a bunch of lobbyists prepare a non-sensical bill and then try to jam it through Congress, without any real effort to understand what might actually work. (And, worse, it’s being done in a way that seems deliberately designed to misinform.) So it’s a bunch of backroom, captured discussion that has massive impact on how we live our lives — and it’s all completely opaque (at best).
The real thing that I’m worrying more and more about is not SOPA per se, although that’s a very large problem itself. The real problem that I see is that our government just isn’t set up to make meaningful technology policy decisions going forward. I think Larry Lessig would argue that that’s now true about all facets of modern life, but I think that with technology it’s significantly worse. We have massive interconnectedness of systems built on an extremely rapidly changing foundation of technology. But more than that, technology is now transforming our private and public lives so quickly that we can hardly make sense of any of it at a personal level, let alone a public policy level. And there seems to be no way for legislation to keep pace unless we change the discussion there from specific technologies instead to principles of how we want to build and evolve our society.
And I just don’t see how that kind of conversation can happen right now.
I see how to defeat SOPA, more or less. But it’s more lobbying, more rhetoric, more Capitol Hill influence. And I think that all of that stuff ultimately corrupts industries that use it. I know this is not a new objection, and I’m sure that there have been people in every industry forever who have made this point.
So I think most of what I wanted to write on Friday is this: I desperately hope we can (1) defeat SOPA and more importantly (2) figure out a way to have useful technology policy discussions that can inform both our legistatures and law enforcement agencies. This isn’t the last law that will be technically poor and will impinge on civil liberties. There will be more, and they’ll come up more and more frequently as increasing portions of our society get disoriented by and disrupted by new technology.
We shouldn’t rely on symmetric (and corrupting) lobbying efforts to make things better; we’ll just get more of the same crummy situation we’ve got.
What I think we really need to figure out is how to help our leadership in government act and think in a more agile way, informed by more of our citizenry. More like the web, in a lot of ways. (Ed Lee’s announcement of an SF partnership with Code for America is a start.)
Maybe impossible, a pipe dream. But that’s the target I think we should be setting for ourselves, not just defeating a crappy, misinformed bill.
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This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2012 at 9:30 am and is filed under Greylock, Mozilla, Personal stuff, politics, The Internets. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
6 comments
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Joey Flores January 9, 2012 at 10:26 pm“I was actually a little nervous writing about SOPA last week because of the tone of the conversation to date. I felt like it might actually provoke harsh negative reaction and somehow brand me as “SOPA-friendly” or against the web.”
John – I want to thank you for your level-headed comments on this issue. As the owner of an internet company who relies on DMCA protections, and as someone who understands the value of due process, I must oppose SOPA. But as a musician, artist, and evangelist for the music community, and someone who gladly pays for all the content I want to own, I feel obligated to stand up for the rights of artists. In doing so, I find myself at odds with a community of technologists who refuse to admit that music and movies are more than “ideas” that should be freely spread around the world. It seems that you can’t have a differing opinion without being labeled a Luddite. And by simply standing for the rights of artists, it seems easy to alienate the tech community, which is an unfortunate environment to be in.
I have been saying since the SOPA debate began that the real problem, to me, is that the technology community does not step up to address piracy until it’s time to oppose legislation like SOPA. When there is not overreaching legislation on the table, most act as if there is no problem. They leave developing solutions to the media industry, who has no incentive to place reasonable burdens on themselves in their own legislation, and will continue to propose things that infringe on our rights until something passes and we’re all the worse for it.
As an exercise I took it upon myself to write an alternative concept last month that involved creating a central agency for handling DMCA takedown notices and resolutions, with scores for infringing companies and abusive rights holders, with steep penalties for being mass infringers on either side. I think the best thing that anyone can do in this situation is what you’ve done – admit that you don’t know all the answers, but that you recognize there’s a problem, and that just saying no to one side’s proposed solution isn’t getting us anywhere. The next step, to me, is to encourage people who have the most to lose and gain in this situation to work on this issue when it’s not life or death, when there is room for debate and an opportunity for cooperation. Waiting until there is a bill in front of Congress raises the stakes and makes it impossible for both sides to engage in productive discourse.
Thanks again for putting yourself out there about this. It’s important to both sides, even if they don’t see it.
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Robert Kaiser January 10, 2012 at 8:34 am
“What I think we really need to figure out is how to help our leadership in government act and think in a more agile way, informed by more of our citizenry.”
Once again I have to agree 100% with you. From all I’ve seen, that’s true in most countries (looking at democracies at least – in other systems, citizenry helping the government there is probably not a topic anyhow).
From my experience with having been active in a political party at “low levels” at least, I also think that many politicians would very much appreciate finding solutions in this area, but they are just about as clueless as us on how to get to such solutions. Maybe it’s time for agile developers and politicians (or their advisors) to work together on strategy and try to find some way to bring those philosophies together.
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Brad Feld January 11, 2012 at 9:51 am
Fantastic John. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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John Stack January 11, 2012 at 10:22 am
Thanks John (and thanks brad for the link).
Have you considered #OPEN? Personally, it is as far as I can see government getting involved in the fight against piracy. (More here: bit.ly/xq0JOV)
These days, I don’t know if we can assume that the right thing happens; therefore, when you have your voice and you feel strongly about something, use it. In this case, these bills affect our first amendment rights. I think that’s as serious as it gets.
I’m glad you used your voice and I hope you continue.
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Travis February 3, 2012 at 4:21 pm
Man, SOPA and PIPA just drive me crazy. I am shocked legislation like this was being just rammed through congress.
In response to #Open, while it is better then SOPA, it still suffers from the same fundamental problems…legislating to stop piracy isn’t the answer. Its already against the law…
“Progressive” versus “conservative” as descriptive terms, at least per the usual political meanings ascribed to the terms, is a bit of a misnomer, don’t you think? When you can find groups as diametrically opposed as RedState and Daily Kos (not to mention other less prominent online political voices), it can’t simply be progressives versus conservatives. And as far as party affiliations of actual politicians go, this article lists a few other critics with a variety of D/R affiliations. I don’t actually know what the party breakdown looks like overall. But it seems doubtful to me that it’s really a progressive/conservative breakdown.
I assume you didn’t mean the terms in that sense, of course. But using them muddies waters which already suffer from too little clarity.
As far as Google goes, being against SOPA seems entirely in their interests given their ownership of YouTube. But I do think their support is due to more than that, and probably substantially comes from it being the “right” thing to do, as well.
Other than that, however, I completely agree with this post and the previous one. Content creators have a valid beef; SOPA’s just an overreaction. Unfortunately I don’t have any clearly better ideas than just doing nothing, so thus far I’ve basically felt like it’s mostly useless for me to try to say any more.
The way the Internet completely ignores existing political governance boundaries means that I don’t see any good solution that actually addresses the real problem: the states that don’t protect IP in some way that lets content creators get a reasonable amount of respect. (“reasonable” is eminently debatable, of course, but I think everyone can agree it’s more than the nothing they get in various quarters now.) Which is why, all things considered, I’m ecstatic that it’s not my problem to solve directly. (Cold comfort as that may be if, but hopefully not when, Congress eventually screws it up.)