SOPA – The Artist’s POV
Congress caved today and it looks like SOPA and PIPA may be DOA. That’s good news for now. But while the legal train has come off the tracks, we still have a problem. So before the discussion rides off into the sunset, we wanted to take a last shot at why something still needs to be done because this issue is far from finished. This is just the beginning of a bigger battle over intellectual property rights. Artist’s rights are still being trampled and the entertainment community is losing billions.
We originally wrote a column on the SOPA and PIPA legislation from the standpoint of content distributors and aggregators. In that piece we said that we believe this legislation, if passed and strictly enforced, would dramatically change the Web. SOPA is a deal-breaker because it would punish most of the people who blog, post, Facebook, Tweet, Tumblr, share and “surf” (remember that term?) the Web. The Internet would become a place filled with anxiety and paranoia and creativity would take a big hit. We still believe that, BUT we don’t believe that things can stay the way they are now either. SOPA may be all wrong as a solution but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a big problem.
The big tech companies and web patrons would like us to believe that by enacting Internet intellectual property laws with real teeth, creativity would suffer. Before we embark on that argument however, we need to remind you that these laws are not about intellectual property and they aren’t even about stifling creativity. SOPA and PIPA are about compensating the people and companies that create truly original content.
To understand better why a creative person or a company that creates content might be rooting for this kind of legislation, we thought it would be best to spotlight just one “artist” who has surely suffered financially as a result of the lack of IP protection on the Web. We specifically picked an artist who engenders what the Wonder Wall (www.wonderwall.com) and the New York Times (www.nyt.com) would classify as an “Eh” response from most people. Unlike Disney, a company that doesn’t really engender a lot of public sympathy when it comes to gross and net revenue losses, we thought we’d pick someone who scores a 10 on the “Ambivalence Scale.”
Ladies and gentlemen, we give you George Michael…and Wham.
You’re first reaction is probably WTF?! George Michael? What’s he doing in a discussion about creative? Fact is, he’s sold a gazillion CDs but that’s a discussion for another day. For today, he will help us make a case for SOPA – he and his song “Last Christmas.” Because no matter how you feel about George Michael, less than a month after the holiday season you’re probably still trying to get that holiday song out of your head. You know? “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart and the very next day, you gave it away….” It was everywhere. But again, this is not about the content or the quality of it – this is about compensating the artist for its creation.
To understand why a guy like George Michael would support SOPA legislation, we suggest that you Google® the term Last Christmas. You get over 17 million results, most of which refer to this song. At the top of the list is the YouTube® offering which has been played over 7 million times. This is a link from the WHAMVevo site on which Last Christmas has been viewed over 19 million times. OK, that’s their decision and we suspect George and Andrew Ridgely posted this to both their site and to YouTube in order to promote their music. That makes sense and that’s a business decision that they make. Now, scroll down the YouTube sidebar and you will find an almost endless list of people who have borrowed Last Christmas in its entirety, recreated their own videos and uploaded them as “original content”. These are home movies in which the shots are awful, the video quality abysmal and the only reason for the hundreds of millions of views is Wham’s “Last Christmas”. Really. If you don’t believe us, take a minute and watch a few of them if you can.
That’s a problem. We all believe that we have a right to shoot video of unsuspecting citizens, assemble photos of other companies’ licensed products, sample other people’s music and reproduce other writer’s prose on our sites – that’s not really true. We are really not entitled to repackage other people’s creative content as our own in order to generate traffic to our own sites so that someday we can earn a living from the click-throughs we generate…using other people’s stuff. How fair is it really that we get the cash – and George Michael gets nothing?
Again, we don’t have the solution. We do know that giving content creators nothing for their work isn’t right but punishing “bundlers” for re-packaging and re-purposing creative won’t solve the problem either. This situation calls for all the Internet techs and web innovators to develop a situation where viewers pay something and creators get something – no matter how small. That is the next step in the Internet’s evolution. And it can’t come soon enough.
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