Of course it's defensible: we're protecting American jobs...US film industry alone is worth $billion$...good American jobs...stemming the tide of pirate warez flooding our shores...could anyone make Star Wars today with the economic threat of piracy blah blah.
I think SOPA is terrible legislation and that copyright creep is a danger to our long-term competitiveness. But the entertainment industry is a large part of the US economy and has some legitimate concerns about how to protect its cash flow in an age where the marginal cost of copyright infringement is asymptotically approaching zero. Naturally the industry is going to argue for an extremely narrow interpretation of property rights under such circumstances, and copyright radicals don't help themselves with rallying cries such as 'information wants to be free' which sounds suspiciously like welfare socialism for couch potatoes. So far the best argument from the reform side is 'make better content and people will willingly throw money at you' which is on a par with demanding that government or captains of industry create more jobs or cut spending or pay more taxes.
It takes little account of the producers' economic dilemma, which is unreasonable, and in policy arguments the least reasonable-sounding participant usually loses. Notice how the best public wins against the RIAA and its ilk have come as a result of unreasonable overreach, eg the contention that LimeWire users owe RIAA members $75 trillion in damages. SOPA can be sold to a largely indifferent and ignorant public as a reasonable response to the objective fact of industrialized copyright infringement. As you might have noticed, the public is not too hot on free trade and related concepts at the moment, because unemployment is so high and wage growth is so low. So the Techdirt crowd end up sounding like the digital equivalent of Occupy Content - even where people may agree with it, there's a certain air of entitlement to the whole thing, the public has a limited appetite for the Chicken Little story, and the ongoing failure of the sky to fall (ie of innovation to halt despite the lamentable flaws of the copyright and patent systems) eventually causes them to stop listening.
This is rapidly turning into a philosophical argument, and we're probably not going to agree about methods. My question to you (and indirectly, to Techdirt) is this: what/where is the alternative to the IP status quo that will increase cash flow and jobs? A nice simple easy-to-understand alternative is a necessity, because although I personally believe in creative destruction and the marketplace of ideas, 'leave it to the market' is not a winning argument with the general public right now. What's needed is a positive alternative that offers an obviously bigger payoff than SOPA.
Of course it's defensible: we're protecting American jobs...US film industry alone is worth $billion$...good American jobs...stemming the tide of pirate warez flooding our shores...could anyone make Star Wars today with the economic threat of piracy blah blah.
I think SOPA is terrible legislation and that copyright creep is a danger to our long-term competitiveness. But the entertainment industry is a large part of the US economy and has some legitimate concerns about how to protect its cash flow in an age where the marginal cost of copyright infringement is asymptotically approaching zero. Naturally the industry is going to argue for an extremely narrow interpretation of property rights under such circumstances, and copyright radicals don't help themselves with rallying cries such as 'information wants to be free' which sounds suspiciously like welfare socialism for couch potatoes. So far the best argument from the reform side is 'make better content and people will willingly throw money at you' which is on a par with demanding that government or captains of industry create more jobs or cut spending or pay more taxes.
It takes little account of the producers' economic dilemma, which is unreasonable, and in policy arguments the least reasonable-sounding participant usually loses. Notice how the best public wins against the RIAA and its ilk have come as a result of unreasonable overreach, eg the contention that LimeWire users owe RIAA members $75 trillion in damages. SOPA can be sold to a largely indifferent and ignorant public as a reasonable response to the objective fact of industrialized copyright infringement. As you might have noticed, the public is not too hot on free trade and related concepts at the moment, because unemployment is so high and wage growth is so low. So the Techdirt crowd end up sounding like the digital equivalent of Occupy Content - even where people may agree with it, there's a certain air of entitlement to the whole thing, the public has a limited appetite for the Chicken Little story, and the ongoing failure of the sky to fall (ie of innovation to halt despite the lamentable flaws of the copyright and patent systems) eventually causes them to stop listening.
This is rapidly turning into a philosophical argument, and we're probably not going to agree about methods. My question to you (and indirectly, to Techdirt) is this: what/where is the alternative to the IP status quo that will increase cash flow and jobs? A nice simple easy-to-understand alternative is a necessity, because although I personally believe in creative destruction and the marketplace of ideas, 'leave it to the market' is not a winning argument with the general public right now. What's needed is a positive alternative that offers an obviously bigger payoff than SOPA.