D.A.'s Wild Ride

Ian Rogers’ SOPA Solution

Very thoughtful proposal from Ian Rogers. Read it all here.

“There is a solution which curbs piracy, grows the industry overall, gives equal opportunity to all content holders, and allows for exponentially more innovation in the digital media space than we’ve seen in the past fifteen years. My proposal:

In brief:
A content registry where copyright holders can express the rules governing the use of their content and a legislative requirement sites dealing in media respect the rules expressed by the rights-holder in the registry.

In more detail:
A central organization or consortium would construct a content registry software solution and service. Copyright holders would place their media along with all the rules governing the use of said media, in the registry. These machine-readable rules would contain the prices for various uses of the content, from download and streaming to inclusion in subscription or other services. Any application creators willing to abide by the registry’s rules would be welcome to utilize the content, though rights holders could still opt in/out of specific services via the registry, too.

If you are building a sites with legitimate uses which could also be leveraged for piracy then you use the registry for a different reason, testing to see if the content uploaded by a user is available for the use in question. For example, if I upload a file to Rapidshare for free download, Rapidshare does an Audible Magic-style identification on the file then checks the registry to see if this content is available for free download. If so, awesome. If not, kick it back to the user. This is a non-trivial development challenge with many questions about who would build and maintain it, but it’s not science fiction. The technology exists. YouTube has very sophisticated recognition and rights management technology today. Similar systems have been built by countless companies over the years. Look under the hood of services such as MediaNet, 7digital, Rhapsody, and many others and you’ll find independently-developed versions of such a registry managing rights, paying rights-owners based on varying kinds of usage, etc. This solution would make a similar registry and technology available in a non-proprietary way.”

My Thoughts On The SOPA Protests

This is probably an imprudent post given my friends in tech, but I must admit to being slightly annoyed by the SOPA protests. I don’t know its particulars well enough to weigh-in on the legislation itself, but the faux-bohemian aesthetic of the resistance, conjured up by these internet millionaires and billionaires, rubbed me the wrong way.

I am all for a free, uncensored, rapidly evolving internet, but it’s simply disingenuous how so many tech players hide behind the DMCA’s ISP loophole while building fortunes off the backs of the creative class. As a society, I think it’s imperative that we protect those who commit themselves to making beautiful things, and it is sad to me that Silicon Valley doesn’t seem to take seriously the importance of reducing piracy.

I’ve pirated music, software, TV shows, and movies like everyone else in my generation, but usually only because convenient legal alternatives were not available. I’m never “proud” of stealing, though, and I would never publicly belittle the rights of the folks who made the things I’ve stolen.

I’m sure SOPA sucks, and more power to every citizen who wants to voice their opinion about a policy. But when you accumulate vast money and power, you sort of lose the license to be a countercultural freedom fighter. Yet that was the posture of those shutting down sites and blocking out comments in response to SOPA. Meanwhile, they have been funneling millions to lobbyists, currying favor and influence with political elites, and living like kings.

Just imagine all of the investment banks getting together and making a similar public fuss over their lobbying agenda. Wouldn’t we all find that pretty unbecoming?

I have nothing but love for my friends in the technology World, but I do think that they could be more sympathetic to those who make the art that drives users into their digital empires.