Insert Government Here
Confusion abounds about where the government should and should not be involved with the Internet.
It really isn’t that complicated. Apply old principles to these new problems, and the government’s proper Web role becomes readily apparent.
Where Government Has No Internet Role
The Internet has rapidly developed into a free speech, free market Xanadu – without any sort of Net Neutrality regulations in place. About which the pro-Net Neutrality Left is willfully, stridently ignorant . And is stultified into incoherence when this absence of regulations is pointed out to them.
Private companies have spent hundreds of billions of their own dollars to build the ‘Net – and make this Web revolution possible.
Old Principle: This is no different than any other sector of the private economy where private money is spent on development.
The government doesn’t dictate to shopping malls how they can manage the traffic to their various stores. The government doesn’t prohibit stores from advertising within the mall to (hopefully) drive more folks their way.
If the government did, it would be a flagrant First and Fifth Amendment violation. Why, then, is the government illegally asserting the “authority” to do this on the Internet?
Private property is private property – whether it is brick-and-mortar or virtual. And free speech is free speech.
The government has no Constitutional authority for Network Neutrality – period.
Where Government Has an Internet Role
Private Property Protection
Old Principle: Government stops thieves. Government does as much as it can – within Constitutional parameters – to do so.
If forty years ago I had a record store – or twenty years ago a compact disc (CD) store – and someone was stealing my inventory and then selling it, the government would have worked to desist them.
New Problem: Why then is it kosher with so many Leftists – and some sorely misguided Libertarians – to give the green light to digital theft of music, movies and more?
Case in point: The uber-larceny website MegaUpload.com and its illegal impresario Kim Dotcom.
Police Cut Way Into Mansion To Arrest Megaupload Founder
The group was accused of engaging in a scheme that took more than $500 million away from copyright holders and generated over $175 million in proceeds from subscriptions and advertising….
Oh, is that all? But surely this blatant mega-stealing is universally opposed, right?
‘Anonymous’ Hackers Hit DOJ, FBI, Universal Music, MPAA And RIAA (to Protest) MegaUpload Takedown
Hmmm. Well surely no one of high-level legitimacy justifies this sort of mega-fraud, right?
Apple Founder “Woz” Defends Megaupload
…Apple founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak…visited Dotcom in New Zealand recently….
“When governments dream up charges of ‘racketeering’ for a typical IT guy who is just operating a file-sharing service, or accuse him of mail fraud because he said he had removed files [to alleged infringing content] when he’d just removed the links to them, this is evidence of how poorly thought out the attempt to extradite him is.
“Prosecutors are attempting to take advantage of loopholes. Too bad for the U.S. government that DotCom lives in New Zealand, which is better on human rights.”
One wonders if “Woz” would be so dismissive were Dotcom ripping $500+ million worth of Apple product. Wait – we have that answer: Apple goes to town to protect their intellectual property whenever it feels it’s threatened.
Woz does inadvertently swerve into a point about the law – it needs to be updated. We must apply the old principle – government stopping thieves – to the new Tech problem.
But when Congress first tried, it was not the answer:
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)-Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA)…(took) a bipartisan beating. Conservatives…joined with Leftists to savage the bill….
I too…opposed…this iteration of SOPA – it remain(ed) too overly broad.
But:
Something similar and more finely, sharply crafted – must become law. And conservatives will need to reorient themselves when a better version of the bill comes along – and support it.
We await that better bill.
Many Leftists/Libertarians may remain stridently pro-theft. But most Americans are not.
They are genuinely interested in the rule of law, protecting private property – and not paying prices dramatically inflated by online heists.
Again demonstrating that they inherently know when the government should be involved in the Internet – and when it should not.
When someone steals a physical product business owners are directly hurt because they have to buy replacement inventory just to get back to where they started.
But when someone illegally copies a digital product the owner doesn’t actually lose their product or have to replace anything. The only damage is that they have lost a potential customer, and a poor customer at that. Many pirates steal because they are either too poor to buy the product at its actual price or not interested enough in the product to pay market value. If piracy was impossible they just wouldn’t buy and the product owner still wouldn’t be making money off of them.
So I am always skeptical when industries announce they have lost $500 million to piracy. Odds are only a tiny fraction of those pirates would have bought the software.
I’m not saying that piracy isn’t bad or a violation of property rights. It is frustrating when people cheat the system and get things they didn’t pay for. In a perfect world it wouldn’t happen. But in the grand scheme of things piracy is much less of a problem than physical crimes or the vast government interference that would be required to reliably stop it.
Eric Flint makes an interesting case for free filesharing here:
http://www.baen.com/library/intro.asp
Short form, he found that having his books free online actually *increased* his profits as an author.
You seem a little confused about file sharing and digital theft.
First: the arrest of MegaUpload’s founder and the takedown of their servers was illegal. A little googling will lead you to this information.
Second: that takedown was the equivalent of police searching a building for stolen goods, then confiscating the goods and the building, as well as every other building on the block, evicting innocent people and destroying their property and livelihood in the process. Consider that many games use file sharing sites to distribute upgrades and installers. So do many Linux distributions. All perfectly legal. Then there are the file sharing sites people like me use to put photos we’ve taken where family members can access them.
Third: File sharing is not the same as theft of electronic material. There are many legitimate uses for file sharing.
Fourth: Current law is unjust. According to the DMCA it is illegal for disabled people to exercise their right to view material they have legally purchased if the material they purchased has electronic copy protection that prevents assistive technology from allowing them to view it. Doing this is classified as “piracy”. Get that? If a blind person buys an ebook and their text to speech reader can’t get past the ebook’s encryption, it’s considered the same level of crime for them to break that encryption to read the book they bought as it is for someone to steal a physical copy of the book. Under the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising the line between legal, illegal, moral and immoral has blurred into a gray smear. Oh, and it’s also illegal for someone who runs Linux to watch a DVD on that computer. Even if they bought the DVD. That’s also “piracy”.
Until Government stops taking orders from whoever waves the biggest check in their direction, I don’t want them having anything to do with regulating the Internet. We’d end up with what the entertainment companies wanted from the start: anything that anyone could possibly use to perform an illegal act would be banned. (Yes, they did try to ban video recorders because it was possible to copy with them. Fortunately back then someone was sensible enough to tell them that the existence of legitimate uses meant it shouldn’t be banned. Now… well, that argument’s been lost several times over.)