A Real Alternative to SOPA, or Fixing the DMCA

I decided to read on anyway. It's clear that the author has put a lot of care into this post and is doing his best to come up with an idea that can bridge the gap to his detractors. Unfortunately, I fear he is still missing the point.

Banning websites will not stop piracy. Just as CD protection, hardware dongles, remote authentication, signed binaries and every other technique under the sun only serves to frustrate legitimate users, so shall the specter of the SOPA DNS censor be memorialized upon the ash heap of history.

The author and those who think website bans are a solution need to realize that bits are the cheapest commodity on the planet. This is a fact of life. There is no getting around it. I said this in the last thread and I'll say it again: if the full value of your work can be represented in totality as a string of ones and zeores, you must accept the reality that computers, the most ubiquitous machines on the planet, are all designed to push around ones and zeores. Any solution to copyright woes that involves attempting to stop the copying of bits will fail, it's like trying to insulate current by attempting to dry water. Every effort in the field of computers over the last half century has been aimed at making it easier to share information, there is no effective censorship solution in a world where information flows freely.

By the time the author's proposed bureaucracy can be established and come into effect, the tech world will have moved on to the next data sharing revolution which will simply render the DNS ban irrelevant for pirates. Those who shall suffer a loss of free speech under the inevitable abuse of DNS bans will simply be fucked (since they follow the law).

Find a way to create value that isn't inherently rooted in the order of your bits.

I think many people have forgotten the purpose of copyright. Ultimately the people decide what is lawful and what is not in a country, by electing their representatives (at least in theory). So the point of copyright was that "we the people" would make it so the creators get some protection for their works, so we can encourage more creation in the world. But I think we forget that protecting the works is a means to an end - not the ultimate goal itself.

There are a lot of "creations" out there that are based on other people's previous work, just like there are a lot of technological inventions that are based on other people's works, too. This is how the world actually works. We build upon each other's works. Yes there should be some sort of protection. No, there shouldn't be supreme protection to protect the works at all cost and for decades at a time. Otherwise the society itself loses, and it defeats the purpose of why the copyright (and patent) laws were created in the first place.

We should stop taking whatever MPAA and RIAA say at face value. They aren't really looking to save the society's culture and creations. They want maximum protection for the works they control, because they want to increase their own revenues as companies. And they want to keep their current business model.

In the end the Internet is a disruption to them, just like it is for many other businesses. We should let that disruption happen without getting the Government involved to stop it from happening. Plus, there have been studies that have shown piracy is a service problem.

Think of the Hulu example. Would the networks really want to switch to the Hulu model, and lose their traditional business? No of course not. But that doesn't mean Hulu-like services are not the future. So the networks can either get fully behind Hulu, or their viewers will eventually move completely to other services online.

The piracy "problem" for music and movies is a lot like that, too. Either the labels move fully behind new types of services like Spotify and so on, and allow them to profitable, too, or they can continue to be greedy, and charge the maximum revenue they can from them, and also stop any new such initiatives that they think would lower their revenue even further.

Even if they somehow manage to "stop online piracy sites". That doesn't mean they will actually stop piracy. First, because like others have said, people will develop new tools to circumvent their restrictions, and second because people will just rip DVD's and so on in the real world, and pass them along to friends. So blocking some sites online still won't stop the fundamental problem, that piracy happens because people no longer want to pay $1 for every song they want to listen to.

I don't think as written it would work well, because of an incentive misalignment. Nobody wants to run this centralized website, not even the government. Nobody will want to staff it, or enforce it, or deal with the huge, huge, huge pile of false positives it's going to generate, both generated by technology and generated by hostile people gaming the system. (Yes, I know you address that topic and I acknowledge that, but somebody still has to do the things you mention.) Half the decisions this site would make would end up in court anyhow, and then we're right back where we are now, only with an extraneous step in the middle.

It's also now a centralized control point which will experience regulatory capture for any number of things you never intended but are far worse than mere infringement. Actually, as a CEO of a small company in the space, this system would sign your death warrant far more effectively than any amount of piracy... regulatory capture does not favor the small companies!

Also, nothing you've discussed covers torrent sites. They don't have the content to be fingerprinted in the first place.

I also find it unlikely that anything like this idea could possibly pass 1st Amendment muster. It's still a government web site which every expression of speech is being routed through and approved yea or nea. I'd rather see the entire industry go flat out of business than lose free speech. It isn't the choice we face, but if it were, the choice is clear.

However, there is an issue which I believe is being overlooked here, and that is that the internet is an INTERNATIONAL resource. Content on the internet comes from all corners or the globe, and overseas the issue that most people have with SOPA is that it allows the US government to play enforcer on a global platform!

When one considers international law, whether material infringes on copyright becomes much less clear. The definition of 'fair use' is really only codified in the American legal system, with infringements determined on a case by case basis in most EU countries. What about content created internationally? In the current US system certain protections kick in to any created work, meaning that a work distributed freely overseas may become infringing if distributed in the US. Should content be censored in this case? This is without even considering the myriad of different cultural issues which come into play. Should Lese-Majesty cases be considered here? Should libel and slander be considered here?

To allow the body to be internationally representative, then it must be powerless, as no system could possibly encapsulate the laws of all sovereign nations. If it is to be effective, it must choose the laws of one nation over another, in this case, probably the US.

I end with this final plea, to both the implementers of the SOPA legislation, and to the author: If you must implement legislation like this, keep it TO YOURSELVES. The US does not represent all countries using the internet, and certainly does not represent the laws of all countries on the internet.

So there's now a tax to run a website. And we centralize control over the whole internet via DMCA.org? We're climbing a steep hill here and we've barely started. Also, you realize that sites can be served via compromised computers... right? Who answers for those? Not a big problem, you say? Well, aside from the botnets and such already out there that you apparently don't know about. And we're creating new incentives to create such things, too....

> Each website has a DMCA score based on complaints, response times and repeat violations, and websites with "mass infringement" status may be blocked

I assume you have the Pirate Bay in mind, but pretty much any popular user-generated site drowns in complaints already. And many of them already have tools that big rightsholders can use. So do we shut down YouTube? Viacom tried to.

Finally, there's all this stuff about "blocking." You're assuming that you can make a block that works. Problem is, you can't. If there's one source in all the world, it's enough for everyone. You can't block 99% of the world, because that last 1% will share copies with the rest. There are no filters on sneakernet. You vastly underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of DVDs. The government couldn't stop the spread of thousands of classified cables with the military at their disposal. China can't stop dissidents from getting through the Great Firewall. I've watched, for basically my entire life, as people came up with the same ideas, then hit the same failures. For every wall you put up, someone will create a ladder or a tunnel. Even Sisyphus didn't have it that bad.

You can't really make piracy significantly harder, but you can make buying things easier. Look at iTunes: I doubt there's a single thing on there that can't be found somewhere online for free. Yet they're a huge success because it's fast, easy & convenient. Make it easy to buy, easy to use, fun to experience. The pirates can't copy you, and successful performers make use of that, too.

But get your fans caught in the crossfire when you're trying to make things harder to pirate and they'll abandon you for an artist who treats them well. They're not pirates: they can, will and have bought from people who treated them well. But if you screw them when going after pirates, well, there's a lot of other music out there to buy and they don't need yours. Reminding potential customers that they don't need to listen to your music is not great for conversion, incidentally. But don't take my word for it, run an A/B test and see.

That said, you're absolutely right that things need fixing. But a far more realistic approach would be to fix copyright itself. William Patry (a famous lawyer & scholar of all things copyright) has a new book with some interesting thoughts on that:

http://books.google.com/books/about/How_to_Fix_Copyright.htm...

Like he says, "the proxy battle for control of technology and markets through copyright laws must stop."

Note the absence of "copy" rights.

Joey,

I find your ideas completely at odds with the First and the Fourth Amendments.

In particular, the Fourth Amendment was adopted because under British rule, when the authorities were given the power to seize property and documents without first having to prove probably cause, those authorities abused the system. As predicted 200 years ago, we give UMG the authority to interfere with our business without a warrant, and this is exactly what happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364808

It is a foundation of our nation that only the government can order your property and documents seized and only on sworn testimony or affidavit.

I would prefer to find a way that copyright holders can make money doing what they do, since I am one. But if I have to lose copy "rights" because they cannot be protected without shitting on the Declaration of Independence, or the First and Fourth Amendments, then I'll chose to let it go.

So if you would like to name your organization "The FBI" and require that all actions first acquire sworn testimony before a judge or an affidavit, and that false testimony will result in jail time for perjury, then we might have something to talk about.

I would suggest the author do more research on the issue before proposing DNS blocking. The myriad problems with it have been expounded upon by others who are highly qualified to do so, so I won't reiterate them.

I applaud the author for giving it an honest shot and rising to the challenge of proposing their own solution, but there's nothing here that's much better than SOPA.

If we, as the tech community, are to propose fixes for piracy, they will be in the form of new technologies and business models, not regulation. This is, in fact, what we've been doing. That the copyright industry is generally a reluctant participant in this process is the only real source of hindrance to wider acceptance.

However, I think there are some fundermental issues he may not put into consideration.

1. Sites that enable piracy are really not the cause of piracy. They just solve a problem millions of people prove they have' the need to share music. Computers/the internet just made what we have been doing much easier. You are trying to change human nature. When I met cassette tapes, music was shared. When we start moving bits from one human brain to another, music will still be shared that way.

I am launching my music startup in a few weeks and I will post about our way of working aroud this issue in a way copyright holders and creators can benefit from their works.

I personally think it is futile to stop what is inherent about music and humans. Sharing.

Moderate: No one cares about fixing the DMCA. Most of us want to kill copyright.

Radical: Many of us realize that copyright is already dead and we just haven't had the funeral yet.

Extreme: ideas cannot really properly be owned. We have made do with an imperfect system in order to try to reward intellectual creation. That system is failing, hard, and we're going to get rid of it: patents, copyright, the whole shebang.

Ok, party line recitation ended, carry on.