Hollywood hates your freedom!
To paraphrase our last president, Hollywood hates your freedom. There, I said it. Hollywood is the Al Qaeda of content. It clings to an antediluvian notion of how media should be created and distributed. The SOPA and PIPA acts — which Congress is continuing to consider, despite today’s mass protest against them — are its paternalistic, anti-Enlightenment attempt to suicide bomb the Internet’s ability to disrupt its pre-modern, rapidly deteriorating business model…
Maybe that sounds like crazy talk. But think about it: Hollywood would use SOPA to make it possible for anyone to single-handedly take down any site on the Internet, without the action of a court, just because anyone with access to that site (say, a commenter) used it to link to copyrighted content. What does Hollywood think? That if they win this level of power, the Internet will stop happening in the rest of the world?
That’s why today two of the smartest, most successful guys in America — Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, blacked out the logo on the most iconic homepage on the Internet. But don’t take their word for it — dozens of other sites have followed suit…including many of us on the wordpress.com network.
Hollywood still has an awful lot of our money, and the ignorance of our Congress…is vast. SOPA and PIPA, in other words, are the Internet’s version of the war on terror or the war on drugs. A new reality, a Forever War, which we’ll all be fighting for the rest of our lives — or at least until the end of the protection racket that modern copyright has become.
I spent much of my life as a performing artist, a creative artist. As a geek, I have been a contributing artist to blogs, large and small, for the last eight years. Cripes – I’ve been online since 1983. It’s natural and normal for me to come down on the side of those who are content creators. This fight is with content owners – rarely those who actually create a work of art or communications or thoughts or commentary.
If I must choose a side it is to oppose content owners who in practice couldn’t care less about content or the creative process. Their sole concern is how much they profit from that content.
If I must choose a side – it is to oppose censorship.
