What ten-dollar adjective hasn’t been thrown at the anti-piracy legislation hanging around Capitol Hill like the dark pregnant clouds before a storm? “Draconian” has surely been used, and fittingly. Perhaps one also might call it “unconstitutional,” also apt as it abridges free speech. I think of all the terms I’ve heard, “unexpected” was not one of them.
What seems to shock so many people is that the government would side with big business and secure the means of generating capital in a time of titanic deficit. This only phases them when their pirated movies, music, pornography and television shows are at stake. Let’s be real. At this stage in the game most people probably feel a sense of entitlement to free entertainment.
Pop quiz: When was the last time you bought a new DVD, Blu-Ray or CD? I’m willing to bet the answer is somewhere in the neighborhood of more than a calendar ago. I’ll confess, I don’t like buying retail, either. Most of my budget goes to recycled media from the likes of McKay, Disc Exchange and Raven Records. Furthermore, the idea of “Internet piracy” seems an inflated term which roughly translates to “you are stopping us from financially raping you because you like our product.”
SOPA and PIPA are simply the latest model of tailor-made bills written at the behest of production and distribution giants like the RIAA, along with regulators such as the MPAA. The funny thing is, their complaint about losing jobs and income isn’t on the part of the artists who actually create the product being sold, but the relatively few peons who get rich marketing said product. Let’s take a trip back in time to the turn of the century, when Y2K scared the bejesus out of so many and Napster was the scourge of artists from Metallica to Limp Bizkit (Wiki them, fun times). Columbia House, once a distribution giant whose colorful inserts offered 12 albums for the price of one with subscription to their service, closed its doors as their once lucrative deals faltered in the face of peer-to-peer file-sharing. Their main factory was located in Terre Haute, In. Located on Fruitridge Avenue, wedged between Sony DADC (a disc manufacturing plant, workforce: 100) and Bemis Company (plastic film production, workforce: >800), Columbia House provided 3,300 jobs as of 1996, yet when it finally closed under the merged title of Direct Brands Inc. in 2009, just 147 people were employed at the Terre Haute branch.
So which jobs are being eliminated, exactly? It would seem that with the avenues opened by rapid online distribution, more bands are being formed, more nascent filmmakers are taking a stab at the craft and receiving instantaneous feedback thanks to stream sites like YouTube and Vimeo, and what’s more, human interaction with media is evolving in a way it should have decades ago. Again, let’s be real. Even for an atavistic Luddite who would take vinyl over a digi-single any day, the boundless opportunities which high-speed Internet and a work ethic provide once hopeless dreamers is wish fulfillment at the very greatest, and most American. All the politicians who would say “Internet piracy” inhibits the capitalist promises of our country fail to step back from their myopic party lines and see the bigger picture.
Venture capitalism functions on the “aim big, win big” paradigm. On the flip side, the kids with web cams on YouTube aren’t spending a lot of money or losing any money by doing what they do. Rather, they are saving people money to funnel back into consumer ventures by providing a free service. They are pursuing happiness for the sake of happiness, for the love of the game if you will — that is the kernel of the America I love. If anything, I see this as a boost to the economy rather than the bane of its continued existence. That lies in energy and food subsidies, free trade agreements, multinational monopolies and … Sudoku, right, I’m back.
As vehement reaction has caused even the strongest supporters of these bills to rethink their stance, the threat of danger remains quite real. While the castration of the Internet may not spell doom for this country, it would put us on the level of totalitarian entities such as China, who the same legislators denounce openly. All the same, I think Lincoln said it best, over 170 years ago, when describing America’s future: “If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its authors and finishers. As a nation of free men, we will live forever, or die by suicide.”
Such self-sabotage has been momentarily averted. For how long, your guess is as good as mine.
— Jake Lane is a graduate in creative writing. He can be reached at [email protected].
