How many times on Wednesday did you do a web search that led you to a Wikipedia page that then didn’t load because of that site’s SOPA protest? I didn’t notice the effect immediately but once I did I was later able to go back through my browser history and see that I tried and failed to open a total of 13 Wikipedia pages. Whether you give a damn about SOPA or public protest, this experience has given me a whole new respect for the role Wikipedia has come to play in my life and probably yours. As a result I made a small donation to Wikipedia around lunchtime then was frustrated the rest of the day for not being able to access it.
As for the SOPA/PIPA protest itself, I sympathize. But in my view what we have here is mainly a conflict of business models, dying industries, and really, really poor design that will work itself out over time. Remember the record album — the vynil LP? Some were great, most were not. Too many B tracks if you ask me. The music industry has long had a problem of value. The groups I liked sometimes didn’t have many good songs. The record companies would put one or two good songs on an LP or CD, then throw in 10 more that weren’t so good. All we wanted were good songs at a reasonable price, which didn’t mean the 15-20 percent yield we were getting from albums.
Then came iTunes and all those problems went away. iTunes did more than just sell the songs the record companies were pushing: they sold whole collections of music. As a result, more, not less, music was sold, most of it the good stuff. Music — if not the recording industry — is better as a result. Steve Jobs proved thinking about the consumer is very good business.
Now we have SOPA and PIPA. I would like to have the same ability to build an online movie library as I have done with music, but there are big problems with this, starting with Windows Media Center and, yes, even iTunes — pretty good products in their own right that protect the copyrights of stored content. That part is okay. But they have very little third party support. Then there is the problem of content. I can buy only a fraction of what I’d like to get and it is scattered over several suppliers. If the movie and TV industries think I am going to subscribe to 5-10 services for $10-25 a month each, they’re nuts.
The movie and TV industries are doing now exactly what the recording industry did before iTunes. SOPA and PIPA will die but they’ll be replaced with something just as bad because politicians need votes and producers are afraid of the future — a future that’s coming no matter what the entertainment industry does. For the money they are spending on lobbying, a design team could develop a new system that would make more money by exposing more content, not less, enabling new business models in the process. At least that’s my take on it.
How quickly would an alternative way, an alternative DNS service, would be working to circumvent SOPA, etc? I mean, the IP addresses will be there, you just need a nice, easy way to head along to those sites. Maybe a new business idea looms in the horizon.
Posted by: Ricardo Reis | January 23, 2012 at 04:01 PM
@ricardo reis The problem with that would be that the client software would be illegal.
Posted by: wiredog | January 23, 2012 at 04:02 PM
@wiredog It’s already illegal to pirate. So legality is not the issue since those who pirate would acquire the software to do it.
Posted by: Ronc | January 23, 2012 at 04:03 PM
@wiredog But the client software would be your regular software you use every day. Just publish an alternate DNS server. It would be a “separate” internet, which I’m surprised hasn’t really taken off already. There’s no reason that ICANN should be the _only_ primary registrar, except that it’s vastly convenient for most of the world.
Posted by: Matt B. | January 23, 2012 at 04:04 PM