Hey peeps. So I’m back in Austin for another semester of law school. Since the semester just started, that means I’m doing less studying, more procrastinating, and hopefully blogging once a week or so. I’ve got an intellectual topic today. I’ve been watching all the news, the protests, and the debates over SOPA and PIPA. Thanks to my friend Jen Martinez, who works at Politico, I’ve been following the issue pretty closely and trying to decide which team I’m cheering for. As someone who wants to pursue a career in entertainment law, my heart goes out to the content providers. The core and most important part of their argument and reasons for wanting these laws is that piracy is wrong. There’s no real away around that. Stealing is wrong and when you steal a physical thing from someone, the law punishes you. Stealing a purse or a car is a much easier theft to police because the owner will actually know its missing. With music, movies, videos, games, and whatever else people steal over the internet, it’s a lot more difficult to police because the owner doesn’t necessarily know they’re missing a copy of their work. But at the end of the day, it is still lawlessness and it is still illegal. Then we have the other side; the googles, twitters, facebooks and other Silicon Valley tech giants. They argue that SOPA and PIPA are censorship and legalizing these bills would put us closer politically to China and essentially go against this country’s democratic values. I’ve listened to about 4 or 5 podcasts, and read about 15 to 20 articles, and I still have no idea who I agree with more.
When I was thinking about the issue some more today instead of doing my reading, I started asking myself about the content providers, the production companies, the record labels, the book publishers, and who is really losing out as a result of piracy. Is it the actual artist in most cases or is it the greedy company making a fortune off the artist’s work? Artists, especially musicians, advertise their work for free through mix tapes, youtube videos, Tumblr, etc. When I started thinking about it, I was a little annoyed to realize that no one seems to be focusing on who these bills are trying to help. It’s clear to me that censoring the internet is not going to work and people will always find a way to get something free on the internet. There are just too many websites and too many hackers that are smarter than our government. So the better question to ask in my mind is: how important is the middle man? How important are these content providers to the entertainment industry and how much do artists need the business man in the fancy suit to come riding in on his white horse to strike a deal and show their work to the world? It seems to me the entertainment industry is a very greedy place to be and has lost a bit of its sense of humanity. There’s a lot of rich people at the top who have tunnel vision for dollar bills and a lot of people at the bottom getting taken advantage of. There’s absolutely no support for you if you’re at the bottom and not many people are willing to lend you a helping hand. That’s why they call it a tough industry.
So my question then, isn’t necessarily whether we should be passing SOPA or PIPA but rather who wants these bills passed, who the bills will actually help, and the motivation behind wanting the bills in the first place. If the actual artist isn’t going to benefit from SOPA/PIPA then we need take a step back and ask why we’re doing it in the first place and whether or not its important to help the middle man.
Back later this week with that soup recipe I’ve been promising on Twitter! Sorry for the delay! I’ve been busy doing a whole lot of nothing!
SKs,
Bri
Tags: Entertainment Industry, PIPA, piracy, SOPA
