The pair of legislation- SOPA and PIPA in the US House and Senate- is not an easy thing to tackle. This isn't like finding fun facts about crows or looking at statistics in porn or bitching about the space program or defending the color purple.
This stuff is serious. This stuff is a legit issue.
I was going to ignore it, or tactfully dance around it while talking about other things, but then the Internet went and blacked the hell out, making it a big issue. As they rightfully should have. But I can't just ignore it anymore- and neither, as a blog reader, can you.
Because it's just plain ignorant to do so now. That's the opposite of what the blog was started to do. Time to man up.
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| Just like Jesus would have wanted |
In brief summery, the bills are an attempt stop online piracy. They allow the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders against websites accused of copyright infringement, or accused of spreading copyright infringement. The court order could include barring online advertising from the website, barring search engines from linking to the website and requiring Internet Service Providers to block the website.
Also, it makes the streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Immunity is given to websites that help in rooting out online piracy, and given to websites that unknowingly host copyright infringing content. Unknowing websites would still be liable for damages, however.
I tried to untangle the legalese, promise.
Lets get one thing out of the way- copyright infringement is bad news bears. Period. On a fundamental level, it's the theft of an idea. I do not support that- if I found someone copying all my blog posts, I'd be a little pissed off.
I take it back, I'd be amused... unless they had more readers than I did. Then I'd be calling in fire and brimstone like a vengeful Disney villain.
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| How I would try to stop copyright infringement. This is also why I'm not good at politics |
That being said, there are a few key points in the summary that leave me feeling like I swallowed cat vomit on purpose.
First, it doesn't sit well with me (much like cat vomit) that copyright holders can seek these court orders. I'd feel a little better about the whole thing if they needed to go through a more complicated process with the Justice Department that involves some sort of proof of malicious intent/desire to profit.
I'm a big fan of due process and making sure some fictional amoral company isn't out to try and ruin it's competitors with this bill. Which would be all the companies, as CEOs are generally goddamn psychopaths.
The next two issues are more complicated. I'll handle the technical one first, then the legal one, and if you're not asleep by then I have some high grade chloroform.
The technical problems all stem from the whole "ISP's blocking websites" part. Believe it or not, your ISP does not monitor your traffic- in fact, generally, your ISP could care less about what websites you visit. Actually storing and checking all of that information would be a royal pain in the ass.
Think about the steps required to validate traffic for a second:
First, intercept every packet of data that goes through an ISP's gateway. The largest size a packet can be is 1.5 Mb. That's _tiny_ in today's web, a 30 second YouTube video could have up to three thousand of these packets (not all the packets are actual video data- there is a bit of overhead).
Never you mind the amount of data that an online game might generate.
Next, check the IP destination address of every packet. This is easier than you might think, because IP addresses are always stored in the same place. After that, compare the IP address to some table of blacklisted websites, and if you get a match, drop or (even worse) reroute the packet or generate a reply that explains the content you're trying to access is blacklisted.
That's a lot of work. I'll use numbers to help quantify how much effort just got placed on ISPs. Let's say there are 10,000 blacklisted websites after SOPA gets passed. IP addresses do map to a general ordering (numerically), so the number of steps it would take to search the list for a match is log(10,000), or 4.
That doesn't seem like a lot, you say. But watch.
Every packet has to be checked, so our fictional you tube video would have to go though 12,000 steps, plus the steps required for the request packet (under the best circumstances, 4). And it would have to undergo all these steps at each new gateway hop.
I did a trace route on my laptop on my university's network accessing part of my university's website. I had to go through three hops to get there.
This gives us a grand total of something like 36,012 additional steps for a 30 second clip of How I Met Your Mother if you happened to be on the same network the video was hosted on.
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| I like to think Barney would appreciate the amount of computational complexity required to watch him |
And that's not even the part of the bill anyone is complaining about from a technical side. All the math geeks are more worried about the extra load on DNS servers as they now have to blacklist name queries for copyright infringing content. That shit is easy (as DNS request packets are singular, leading up to only 24 additional steps). But you'd need to do the IP based scanning and blocking as well, or else we'd just go back to memorizing the IP addresses and not the URLs of our favorite pirate websites.
And yes, this means DNS packets would have to get IP scanned, so for our example, that's now 288 more steps. You see how this stuff ramps up very quickly.
The fact is, when you look at the sheer amount of traffic on the Internet, it doesn't make any sense to try and filter all of it. God forbid you start adding to the load by sending reply packets back saying that a website was blocked, especially if the ISPs end up getting staggered (ISP blacklists get de-standardized, as one ISP starts blocking a website another ISP doesn't know about).
And again, I haven't even started on the first amendment stuff or privacy stuff yet, so lets dig into that, shall we?
First, a picture:
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| It's a new thing- brass bands and rap. The guy in the center is gonna lay down some phat rhymes |
Now, lets play a fun game- how does this violate SOPA?
If you answered, it doesn't, stop using your brain and really look. No, not at the subject of the picture, at the background. That's the Foot Locker logo back there, and as such, is copyrighted. I assure you, no one took a picture of street performers and then checked with Foot Locker if it was OK to post online.
You see, with the language of the bill at it's current spot, stuff like this (which isn't a bad picture, to be honest) would be taken down along with all the other pirate websites. This is how SOPA is purposed to work.
And within lies the rub- intellectual property (what SOPA is really trying to protect) is a very hard thing to define. When are you simply taking pictures in front of a giant fucking sign, and when are you actively trying to steal the idea on the sign? What it all comes down to, at some point, we- as a culture- lost respect for artists.
That's what this is all about- not corporations trying to get money, not about the US trying to censor things. It's about art (and the most popular way to consume art, entertainment). At some point (right around when Napster started) we stopped giving any value to creative efforts. Why bother paying for them when we could get them for free, after all?
It was a bitch having to go to the store and actually pick out a song we wanted to hear. But you did it anyway, you got the CD just to find out that all the other tracks sucked ass.
Why do all of that when you could get the song you actually wanted for free? Why just stop at one song for free, might as well get the whole album too. Hell, screw that, just get the entire disography, maybe you'll dig the sucky parts later. Never any thought like, "wait- maybe the person on the other end needs money to survive? And that if I value something, maybe I should pay for it?"
This isn't a problem with other things (like food. Or computers). We seem to have the market concept down when it comes to tangible, actual things. But after we cheapened music, we cheapened software- video games, primarily. Then we cheapened images (do Google searches for copying images from devantART).
Something like SOPA or PIPA needs to exist to try and give value back to creative efforts. There are ways for creative efforts to exist within this new "entertainment is a free right" society we have now- just look at My Little Pony for a great example- but it shouldn't be that way. I don't know the right answer. I do know the wrong one, however.
SOPA and PIPA are well meaning, but at the end of the day, impractical and silly. I think that with some more discussion, perhaps some temperance and moderation- we can find a way to make everyone happy.
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