SOPA, Stop IP, and so forth...

It appears that our Republican babysitters in Congress, with the assistance of our Democrat babysitters in Congress, are ready to pass the two bills mentioned in the title of this post.  They're going to stamp out online piracy and save $100 billion for the American economy every year.  Except they're full of shit.  Even if one accepts the premise that online piracy costs American companies this much money, it's an illogical leap of faith to assume that the same amount is lost from the economy.

For example, it's entirely conceivable that a given internet user who downloads an illegal copy of a movie was not inclined to purchase the movie in the first place.  His motivation for watching the movie may well have been the fact that he found a way to obtain it for free.  Net cost to the economy - zero.

Perhaps a different internet user would have paid to see the movie though.  Surely his illegal download represents a loss to the economy, right?  Maybe, but I doubt it.  Once he spent the ten bucks or whatever it costs to see a movie he would have had ten bucks less to spend on something else.  His illegal download would represent a loss to the movie company, but the net cost to the economy would be close to zero in most cases.

So they may as well drop the canard about money being lost to foreign countries and call the act what it is - an effort to protect companies who write big checks to people in high places.  This is not an unworthy cause, by the way.  Property rights are a fundamental building block of the American system and intellectual property is every bit as legitimate as physical property.  If piracy is a problem for American businesses, then the government has a duty to provide laws and remedies for those businesses.  They're going about it like morons though, as they tend to do.

Theft is an act committed by one party against another.  It should be handled as a matter between those two parties and nobody else.  Providing a way for websites to be shut down for speculative reasons is a disaster for those of us who think of 'freedom' as more than a catchy slogan.  Many of you probably either weren't reading my blog at the time or simply don't recall every load that I've hauled, but I recall very specifically a Christmas trip through Wyoming almost four years ago.  Yep, I drove through Meeteetse and I was reminded of Beavis.  So I found a clip and posted it.  Apparently this was a copyright violation though, as I was told a few days later.

Herein we see an example similar to that of my first hypothetical downloader.  I didn't cost the American economy a single cent and I didn't cost the owner of the material a single cent.  Posting that clip didn't keep me from buying the movie.  I already had the DVD and I never intended to buy it again.  If anything, maybe my post planted a seed of thought in someone else's mind to go and buy it.  Free advertising, if you will.  But Paramount saw things differently and made YouTube remove the video.  Apparently some people in Congress think that YouTube was complicit in piracy as a result of my actions.  Let's just say I disagree.

As I think back on the 1,300+ posts that I've made here, I seem to recall posting a lot of photos, videos, links and other assorted material.  Quite frankly I have no idea whether any of it was copyrighted or not.  I don't have a legal department working on that stuff because I really don't think it matters.  This blog is not a money-making venture and I'm not a significant writer, so I assume that nobody actually cares what I post here.  What if they did care though?  By virtue of hosting my blog with what may be infringing content on some of the pages, should the whole Blogger.com platform be considered a rogue site?  Apparently some people in Congress think so.  Let's just say I disagree.

Just when you think it's safe to go in the water and trust that the Goddamned Republicans have gotten the message, they go and remind you of what they really are - the other side of the Democrat coin.  After three years of unintended (and/or intended in some cases) consequences resulting from every big government idea that the Democrats could throw at us, one would think that the "conservative" party would have learned something.  Nope.  Screwing with the internet would lead to an endless cascade of unintended consequences and apparently these jagoffs are ready to charge right ahead.  Not all of them, incidentally, but enough of them.

Some British dude can explain concisely in twenty minutes what our own elected representatives here in the states are unable to comprehend.  Funny, ain't it?