One of the most frightening events happening today is a piece of legislature that is currently being debated in U.S. Congress. The Stop Online Piracy Act or “SOPA” combined with the Protect IP Act (“PIPA”) have the ability to drastically change the face of the internet as we know it. To put it simply, it would give the Attorney General of the United States and other “Qualifying plaintiffs” (copyright holders) the ability to immediately censor any website that it deems to have committed copyright infringement whether it is a domestic or foreign domain. This in turn would cripple many widely used social networking sites (Youtube, Reddit, Blogs, even Facebook could be severely affected) but would also severely hinder many smaller scale developers, artists and designers.
Of course, it may not be apparent to all how SOPA/PIPA relates to IR, or more specifically the IR theory referred to as “Realism” (as the title of this post suggests) so I shall elaborate on my thinking behind the connection between the two.
The side effects of implementing these bills would be (in my opinion) detrimental to all parties involved. Many people these days have found a happy medium between illegally watching / downloading content ranging from music to movies to videogames, using their own discretion to “try before they buy”. If they enjoy the content, they will purchase it or something similar in order to support the creator and ensure that more content is created in the future. (To use an example, one might download an older album from a band they are unfamiliar with and if they enjoy it they may purchase albums released after that, merchandise or tickets to live performances.)
If this is no longer available people will be forced to purchase everything upfront, which they may be unwilling to do and lesser known products may be lost amongst the sea of corporate mainstream content. Again, how does this link to Realism? Well to put it simply, the relative gain for the corporate media may be strong, but in the end all parties will be worse off with decreased sales for both large scale and small scale developers, musicians, etc.
To my understanding, it goes against Realist theory to think that someone will purchase something if they can easily get it for free. This may or may not be true, it largely depends on the individual, but supporters of the bill seem to think that people are only interested in consuming the content as easily and cheaply as possible, while not worrying about supporting the creators of said content. This is largely NOT the case in my limited experience.
A more Liberal alternative would be something like Netflicks or iTunes that takes advantage of the medium and aims for more absolute gains over relative ones.
Here is a link to Reddit’s blog where the sysadmin goes into more technical detail about what SOPA and PIPA are, and what the consequences are.
And if that reading is a bit too heavy for your taste, here is a great anti-SOPA song by Funk Vigilante that gives a layman’s version of the two bills… fair warning, there are some naughty words.
Excellent post. This is exactly the type of post that I’m expecting from you. Well done!
An interesting topic, indeed, and I admire your attempt to link realist IR theory with the Internet “piracy” legislation.
Reblogged this on Clouds, Clocks and Sitting at Tables and commented:
Here’s an excellent post, which would get a grade of 4/4.