This is war between two ideologies that don't have the time nor desire to sing together Kumbaya while holding hands and trying to come up with a way to help the entertainment industry legislate away reality -- even when it means turning their fans into felons.
I think people who say, “I don’t like to say ‘I told you so, but…’” are precisely the kind of people who like to say, “I told you so.” So I’ll try this another way: I don’t like being that guy who can’t wait to say, “I told you so,” but sometimes, no matter how hard I try, I just can’t help myself.
Last week, after a meeting with my congressman to discuss the legislation I oppose (and he co-sponsors) that is known as SOPA, I wrote a long post in which I included my prediction (or, more precisely, my hunch) for what would happen to the legislation.
Here’s an excerpt from that post that included my hunch:
I came away from the meeting thinking (however, this is a very personal opinion that was not stated or implied by anyone) that as SOPA’s critics turn up the heat (and the general population has seen nothing yet as to what type of heat its opponents can apply to demonstrate what some of the obvious unintended consequences could be if SOPA became law), members of Congress will look for ways to make SOPA go away, while appearing to make it look like they are doing something. Already, the bill’s sponsors have watered it down considerably from its original form. Water it down enough and it may as well be one of those Congressional proclamations declaring “National Anti-Piracy Week.”
Today, (I first saw it reported on the website arstechnica), the White House did one of those “smoke signals” things regarding SOPA (and its Senate twin sister, PIPA) when “three senior White House officials wrote that the administration ‘will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.’”
And yesterday, also as reported by arstechnica, after the users of Reddit displayed how they could raise $15,000 in 48-hours for an anti-SOPA candidate for congress, there is a growing number of Senators and Representatives who are asking for their leadership (from both parties) to give them cover by not bringing up the legislation for any types of votes that will put them on record as being for, or against, SOPA.
Seeing White House policy people and members of congress head for cover is a clear indication that we’ll be one day celebrating National Anti-Piracy Week instead of turning over policing the internet to Time-Warner.
However, let me be emphatic: I’m not declaring victory, nor should anyone else on the anti-SOPA side.
One of the points that I made during my meeting with my congressman — a point that he dismissed — was that issues like SOPA end up having only two narratives — and the entertainment industry had control of the early narrative, but ultimately would lose. My congressman disagreed, saying there are many narratives on an issue as complex as this. As it was a group meeting and I was trying to be polite, I didn’t say, “This is not a complex issue, this is a war over whether or not the entertainment industry should control the internet — and by the time it’s over, nothing more nuanced than that will matter.”
The entertainment industry’s (and the coalition it has been able to enlist) narrative is this: “Piracy, piracy, piracy.” After first being caught flat-footed and far behind, the internet industry (and the coalition it has been able to enlist — for example, everyone who uses the internet who doesn’t work in the entertainment industry*) is this: “Censorship, censorship, censorship.”
Despite the desire of my congressman to turn the SOPA debate into a graduate seminar on intellectual property, this is war between two ideologies that don’t have the time nor desire to sing together Kumbaya while holding hands and trying to come up with a way to help the entertainment industry legislate away reality — even when it means turning their fans into felons.
Nor is there time for those of us who have spent the past decade actually experiencing what reality-changing benefits come from an internet that’s truly open (even more open than many of the tech companies against SOPA want it to be), to delve into the nuanced and intellectual arguments that would take apart the entertainment industry’s lies (although, this post on Freakonomics.com is a good place to start).
So “no-censorship” is the narrative of the anti-SOPA side (my side).
Of course the entertainment industry knows this isn’t just about piracy. Of course the tech industry knows this isn’t just about censorship.
But those are the narratives. And in the end, anti-censorship will win.
Frankly, I wish the anti-SOPA narrative was something more along the lines of an anti-corporate-controlled internet, but I doubt Google and Facebook would go there.
And I wish that songwriters in Nashville and elsewhere would recognize they are being dupes of the record companies and music publishers and performance-rights groups by agreeing to be their poster-children on this issue.
But none of that will happen, so Happy Anti-Piracy Week.
*Slightly exaggerated even though I know pro-censorship** advocates won’t get it.
**Those who call 14-year-old fans of Taylor Swift “pirates”
Non-pirated Bumper music available at Amazon MP3: Kumbaya, performed by Joan Baez
Related:
- What I told my congressman, a sponsor of SOPA (RexBlog.com)
- What my congressman, a SOPA sponsor, told me (RexBlog.com)
Apologies to the person from the UK who is one of the 12 readers of this blog, but many years ago, I discovered that, for me, the perfect cure for insomnia is listening to the World Service of the BBC. As their newsreaders are speaking english (at least I assume they are), there’s enough understandable words being strung together to take my mind off whatever may be keeping me awake. Yet the Ambienic timbre of their voices and their monotonous delivery of random news from obscure corners of the globe all work together in a magical way to knock me out within five minutes of tuning in to their stream.
. Like I said, this is not a new topic for a lot of people — but it is a very new topic for the vast majority of people who think Facebook is the Internet.
: What could be more traditional that watching TV? What could be more innovative than replacing every remote control with one device and iPhone/iPad/Android app (Dijit) that actually fulfills the perpetual promise of combining every remote control you have into one gizmo. And, as you’ll see several more times on this list, it’s from 
and in mega-churches on Sunday morning. In other words, you don’t need this list to find music from Nashville (in the form of CDs or iTunes gift cards) to stick in a Christmas stocking on Christmas eve. However, if you want some Nashville music that’s not by Taylor Swift, here are four ideas (note: this could have been a very long list) that may not have been the type of music you’d think of as being Nashville: 
: Let’s say you were from Akron, Ohio, and you were a super star and could play anywhere you wanted. You’d choose Miami Beach, right? Well, Akron natives Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney (The Black Keys) decided to move to Nashville. In 2011, they won the same number of Grammys the Nashville Symphony won (3). El Camino is their first Nashville-recorded album. Rolling Stone Magazine ranked it one of top rock albums of the year. Heck, even elitist listeners of NPR like me 
: When you want to talk about innovation and tradition merged, well, don’t talk. Just listen to this album created (in Nashville) by whoever your personal higher-being-of-choice might be and Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile, with vocals by Aoife O’Donovan. Nothing I can say about it will come close to describing what happens when you combine the talents of individuals who each have boundless talent.
: When this book by Sewanee author (and creative writing professor at the University of the South) was published in August, New York Time’s Janet Maslin 
