I spend a good chunk of my spare time learning to get better at what I do and a lot of that time spent learning is usually in development of things I’d like to be able to share with people FOR FREE. In fact, this year (2012) will see the release of a few additional FREE items I plan to make available that are far more ambitioous than mere image tools.
If you’ve already downloaded one of my free plug ins for WordPress, you know that I rely on MediaFire to provide downloadable material. Why? Simply because its easy, allows me to monitor what people are downloading (what’s popular) and it doesn’t add any additional transfer to my current host server. Oh, also, I’m not paying to use it as a service! I’m giving away free stuff on a free site! Imagine that!
If you’ve been paying attention, you know that a similar company, Megaupload, was shut down, with its owners and developers apprehended by authorities. Now, it is fair to say that there are unscrupulous people who use Megaupload to make copyrighted material available for illegal download, but one could also argue that its the people performing these acts one should hold responsible, not the enabling organization or service. I live in a large city. It is probably likely that someone, somewhere is commiting a crime in this city as you read this very sentence. Should we shut the whole city down and arrest everyone working for the city government because they haven’t prevented crimes from being commited?
From my perspective, MediaFire has been great to work with and I fully intend to use it going forward. But it is in quite the same danger of being shut down for the same reasons Megaupload was. Worse, should legislation like the Stop Online Piracy Act get passed through legislation (its only been delayed, not killed), it will make companies like Comcast cable the arbiters of who is commiting online piracy. And they wouldn’t even need to provide adequate evidence that the proprietors of the site are the responsible party. Just suspicion based on proxmity to anyone breaking copyright or existing anti-piracy laws.
And do you want to know what the real, sad truth is? The reason certain media companies are so upset about online piracy is because they want to believe, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that the reason their business is not nearly as equitable as it once was is because of illegal downloading.
Here’s a great article on the subject of the music industry’s failure to grasp this very point: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-02-18/tech/30052663_1_riaa-music-industry-cd-era
So should we endeavor to control online piracy? Yes. Absolutely. It is the right of the purveyor, manufacturer and intellectual property owner to control one’s assets. But to hold a service provider responsible for the acts of others isn’t just, fair or even practical. Inevitably, methods of development will ultimately create a proper means to control illegal downloading.
That is the nature of the beast; prohibitive acts spawn criminal activities creating new, innovative means of enforcement, which, subsequently create whole new methods of development and so on. Relying on government agencies to do so always ultimately leads to a certain amount of inequitable legislation that needs to be struck down because it is never crafted with variables in mind. In this case, that variable is the legitimate business person looking to take full advantage of generous services being the unintended victim of this sort of legislative myopathy. Yes, I’m speaking of myself. I’d like to try to keep companies like NewsCorp from being the arbiters of who is and is not guilty of online piracy because – all things being fair in the world of business – it is inevitable that a service like Media Fire would be shut down at their insistence (followed shortly thereafter by NewsCorp introducing a means by which you could download something that you’d have to pay through the nose for, but with the insistence that it’s pirate free – trust them, they know what’s good for you).
Yesterday, I listened to former senator Chris Dodd (now an MPAA exec) engage in a bitter, alarmist tirade about the consequences of not getting SOPA accepted as law. To Mr. Dodd I say, “Lobby for compromise, then.” Because neither side is going to give and if a fair middle ground exists, it will not be legislated behind closed doors in some executive boardroom of a media company looking to subvert the rules to their own purposes, which you can be sure is exactly what would happen and why SOPA and PIPA were so unpopular in the first place.
Make the discussion a public one from the get go and you will see that most people are in agreement: we don’t want online piracy.
But we’ll take it over the unfair dictates of private interests any day.