missed opportunity

The bullying, consensus-enforcing power of the Internet was on full display last week, as the digital jet-set went about paving over anyone who questioned the narrative. SOPA and PIPA were bad laws, terribly bad, and I'm glad they were opposed, but geez. Still, the anti-SOPA movement still lacks an effective spokesperson. Perhaps we need someone who truly represents the revolutionary struggle, speaking truth to power and giving voice to the powerless and afflicted.

 Finally, a hero emerges.

Yes, modern day Robin Hood Kim Dotcom stands apart. He is the brave hero millionaire who will oppose the evil villain millionaires. From the vantage of his fabulous mansion, festooned with luxury and opulence during a global financial slowdown that has impoverished millions, Kim DotCom provides the kind of proletarian credibility the movement has been lacking. True, he's previously been arrested for insider trading and stealing phone card numbers, but hey, victimless crimes, right? (I mean, insider trading-- when have the machinations of stock traders and bankers ever been shown to have negative impacts on ordinary people?) Plus, I'm sure he looks cool when standing next to his fleet of luxury cars. That's got to count for something.

I truly cannot understand the broad swaths of people who look at the MegaUpload situation and continue to speak in the same self-congratulatory terms that have attended the entire anti-SOPA/PIPA fight. Does the fact that the IP reform movement wants broad change mean we can make no distinctions between actors? And don't fool yourself if you think that there is some sort of anti-capitalist bent here. "Freeing" information does not make it free. It only means that you change who gets paid. I know: you hate the music and movie industry. I'm not a fan either. But a site like MegaUpload doesn't make that value magically disappear. It just shifts it to people like Kim DotCom, to the ISPs, to the people who control the server space, to the aggregators and the search engines. And it takes it away from the session guitarists and struggling actors and others who want only to make a decent living producing art. And, yes, to giant soulless aggravating entertainment companies.

Yes, of course: every defendant deserves due process. Of course the fact that the government can do so much without proper due process is atrocious. That ship has sailed, hasn't it? When I bring this argument up to progressives about Obama, I'm told that civil liberties are a niche issue nobody cares about. When it comes to MegaUpload or torrenting, suddenly, due process is imperative. It doesn't say much about our current character that due process becomes important when it comes to downloading IP, and not when it comes to Guantanamo. And if we're asking for procedural justice here, doesn't consistency require that we ask what procedural justice exists in what MegaUpload does? I keep reading posts that demonstrate the limited economic impact of piracy. Is there no consideration of whether IP violations are right or wrong?

Those who spend lots of time on the Internet have a bad habit of believing that they represent the public. Ask the makers of the NBC show Community; they'll disabuse you of this notion. The fact of the matter is that there is a broad majority of Americans who have little or nothing in common with the blogging set, and ultimately the appeal for a saner set of IP laws has to be made to them. Now imagine: you are a typical recession-hit American. You've heard about the SOPA fight. You're sympathetic, to the degree you understand the issues in play. How are you going to feel, when you see the same people who opposed SOPA rallying around a German millionaire, living in absurd opulence in New Zealand, by providing digital content without compensating the people who made that content?

I have asked and asked and asked for those who keep arguing against IP law, in totally black and white terms, to consider those at the bottom in the content-generation world. No one has ever even attempted to answer my questions, instead preferring to complain about me (as is typical). I love the writing program Scrivener, a labor of love by a particular person with a tiny company, the kind of company where small differences in profit and sales can mean everything. Can you easily download a cracked version of Scrivener? Do you even need to ask? Look: I believe that in this capitalist system, those who work hard to create valuable digital content have the reasonable right and expectation to be fairly compensated for that content. I have previously mentioned the unauthorized downloading of the Humble Indy Bundle, a package of games by independent developers, offered on a "pay what you can" basis for charity. Yet these conversations constantly devolve into the flatly untrue notion that people only download IP from large corporations or rich people. There appears to be no coordinated movement online to discourage or stigmatize such a practice. And it's precisely those at the bottom end of the power and profit spectrum who are the most vulnerable. Ultimately, the point isn't the companies and products I can name, it's those who were strangled in the cradle in the first place. Sure, Jay-Z can make a living selling Vitamin Water and champagne. The artist who you'll never hear because of the collapse of the music industry has no such luxury.

At some point, you have to ask: do people who produce the cultural and media objects we love deserve to be compensated for their work? And will those cultural and media objects continue to be created if the answer is no?

The IP debate is the purest expression of a contemporary American conceit: that we can have whatever we want at no cost, that digital technologies have meant the end of the class antagonism that animates human history, that you can identify goodies and baddies and proceed accordingly. Every political question is a battle between winners and losers, every last one. And in this battle, you want me to rush to the aid of someone like Kim Dotcom? No thanks. The information is never free. Somebody gets paid. The question is, which soulless millionaires and corporations do you want to pay? The ones who made the content, or the ones who didn't?