Why the ESA is Wrong to Support SOPA
[Via American Times]
The Entertainment Software Association has reasserted their support of the anti-piracy legislation currently being debated in congress. The ESA’s members include giants in the video game and software industry such as Nintendo, Sony, EA and many more. Earlier reports suggesting some of these companies had withdrawn support from SOPA have turned out to be false.
In its statement, the ESA claims that ”As an industry of innovators and creators, we understand the importance of both technological innovation and content protection, and do not believe the two are mutually exclusive. Rogue websites — those singularly devoted to profiting from their blatant illegal piracy — restrict demand for legitimate video game products and services, thereby costing jobs.”
“Our industry needs effective remedies to address this specific problem, and we support the House and Senate proposals to achieve this objective. We are mindful of concerns raised about a negative impact on innovation. We look forward to working with the House and Senate, and all interested parties, to find the right balance and define useful remedies to combat willful wrongdoers that do not impede lawful product and business model innovation.”
No doubt piracy is a problem, and many of the rogue sites which the SOPA/PIPA legislation seeks to shut down exist for no other reason save to enable piracy of games, music, and film that other people and companies worked hard and spent money to create.
The issue is not that something should or should not be done – most interested parties can agree that some move to better cope with piracy threats is reasonable if not as pressing an issue as many in the entertainment industry argue.
The real problem is that the legislation in question goes too far, giving over too many powers to the government and giving away too much to the industry. So what are the problems with SOPA?
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SOPA makes us like China. Like Saudi Arabia. Like North Korea.Our ability to connect on the Internet would be in the ands of politicians and corporations.
They would determine who gets to be seen online. They would also penalize anyone who even linked to one of the sites they alone get to hide.
The government has already shown that it will ‘kill’ a site in appropriately, not returning it for over a year. SOPA will allow this to be expanded exponentially, with commercial entities providing the need to kill sites.
And the funny thing is that it will do little good anyway in stopping people from finding pirated material if they want. Perhaps if these companies did a better job providing easier access to the materials, things would be different.
But their business model is based on scarcity so they must make things scarce – such as our freedoms and possibly even our civil liberties.
Any politician who votes for this shows their true colors – they are for censorship, for being guilty until proven innocent, for killing the Internet to further their own business patrons, for Un-Americanism. I would not be surprised if some enterprising hacker to ‘Santorum‘ these politicians.
