Jan 7, 2012

What The Hell Is SOPA?

Here's some links and a bit of explanation if you're new to the debate about SOPA.

I think the best place to start is this clip from "Up with Chris Hayes" on MSNBC which provides a fairly good intro.  The biggest problem I have with this video is that NBC exec, Richard Cotten, is never challenged in his assertion that it only covers foreign sites.  You can see Fred von Lohman, a laywer from Google and the EFF, in this video from the Standford Center for Internet and Society rebuff Cotten's position.

In the first video a poor attempt is made to present Internet piracy as a service problem.  That happens to be a view I agree with.  I think it's expressed much more eloquently by Tim O'Reilly in this Gigaom article or by Gotham Gal in this AVC.com post.  

Richard Cotten argues against "the service problem" by pointing out that Netflix, Hulu and others exist.  What he doesn't mention is they're prevented by licensing from providing the content consumers want.  In this blog post you can see Netflix only had 5 of the top 100 box office titles available last year.  The best score was by Amazon which only had 45 of the top 100 titles, less than half.  


Until they make the content available when people want to see it on which ever device or service they want to view it they have no footing in the argument against it being a service problem.


There's a ton more material out there but that's a good start if you're new to the topic.

1 comment:

Nan Greenly said...

Have you seen this video? He's ah quite obnoxious but the message is interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIuYgIvKsc&feature=share