It seemed too good to be true, and it was -— the wave against the Stop Online Piracy Act, a reaction to proposed bills that would dramatically increase the potential for government censorship of the Internet in the name of stopping illegal downloads and protecting copyrights. For a while, I was riding the anti-SOPA wave — genuinely enjoying the Internet blackouts and the sudden political awareness shown by so many 18- to 24-year-olds who typically don't vote or call their representatives. What I hated about SOPA wasn't the goal of protecting copyrights, it was the security-bashing, civil-liberties-be-damned methods by which it would have solved its intended problem. It was a bit like responding to a gunshot with an A-bomb.
It turns out that what I hated about SOPA was different from what most people did: two days after SOPA was tabled, I watched the same people who had been against SOPA descend on the FBI for shutting down Megaupload like a bunch of hyenas on Dexedrine. For the uninitiated, Megaupload was a site on which one could get free bootlegs of pretty much anything. The FBI shut it down, citing massive copyright infringement and has indicted the founders and leadership team.
Here's the thing: while allowing the FBI to shut down any website it chooses for no reason without a court warrant would be a disgusting thing, that's not what happened here — the checks were checked and the balances were balanced, the I's dotted and the T's crossed. Copyright laws serve a purpose. Content creators need content to be worth something if they're going to be able to live. I hate the serving-caviar-to-congressmen-while-claiming-poverty industry groups too, but facts are facts: filmmakers, musicians, actors and writers aren't magical pixie creatures who can survive on buzz and appreciative feedback. They need money to survive and to keep making the art we enjoy.
I don't deny that there is tremendous potential to be unleashed in the free sharing of creative work if that's what its creators honestly choose to do. There are a lot of bands and aspiring filmmakers --— many of whom I love — who share their work for free, and that's great. They've decided the buzz and getting their work out is more important to them, and that's their prerogative. I also don't deny that for many people, illegal downloading serves as a way to gain tremendous personal cultural knowledge without a high cost of entry.
What worries me is the normalization of the behavior — that once people are able to pay, they will have convinced themselves that it's morally okay not to, even given the wide and inexpensive availability of royalties-paying streaming services — most music that worth pirating is on Spotify; the same goes for television and Netflix and Hulu. And what's funny is I see that normalization of illegal downloading happening the most here at NYU, among young creatives, people who will in the same breath rant about the shutting down of Megaupload and then complain that you can't make a living as an artist anymore.
