SOPA Went Down

Image via WikipediaWhat just happened? SOPA went down.

The enormous passion some of the early opponents of SOPA exhibited told me right there and then that SOPA was so going down. And now it is official. SOPA will not make it to the floor of the House. This is victory.

Copyright asks for a new definition. Intellectual property has to be redefined. The nation state itself has to be redefined. There is a guttural feeling among tech innovators that that is the case. And the jinn is out of the bottle. There is no going back.

SOPA Has Egg In The Face
SOPA Is So Going Down

More people consume more news than ever before. But many newspapers have crashed and burned. What is going on? Enormous amounts of music is being created, more than ever before. More books are being written than ever before. If piracy is devaluing intellectual property then there should be this strong signal to authors and music people and creative people in general that they should cease work. But the signal is the exact opposite. What's going on?

Artificial scarcity is being made fun of. Access is being democratized globally. If you have internet access, you are in. Compare that to the pains of getting a visa to the US.

There is so much good news going on. How could such enormous good news be bad news to some people? One person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist.

As far as I was concerned this was a fight between good and evil. Good won.

The Movie Industry's Non Innovation

Image via WikipediaSteve Blank has a great blog post cross posted on ReadWriteWeb.

Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (a third of it in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? ..... From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads. ..... Today it's the Internet that's going to put the studios out of business. Sound familiar? ..... Why was the movie industry consistently wrong? And why do they continue to fight new technology? ........ But why does the movie business think their solution is in Washington and legislation? History and success. ...... when they hired Jack Valenti, who ran the studios' lobbying efforts for the next 38 years. Ironically, it was Valenti's skill in hobbling competitive innovation that negated any need for studios to develop agility, vision and technology leadership. ....... The incumbents tend to have short-sighted goals and often fail to recognize that more money can be made on new platforms and distribution channels. ...... Ironically, the six major movie studios have a great technology lab in Silicon Valley with projects in streaming rights, Video On Demand, Ultraviolet, etc. But lacking the support from the studio CEOs or boards, the lab languishes in the backwaters of the studios' strategy. Instead of leading with new technology, the studios lead with litigation, legislation and lobbying. (Imagine if the $110 million/year spent on lobbying went to disruptive innovation.) ......... The fact is piracy is rampant in all forms of commerce. ..... Grocery and retail stores euphemistically call it shrinkage. ...... SOPA gives corporations unprecedented power to censor almost any site on the Internet. ...... What the music and movie industry should be doing in Washington is promoting legislation to adapt copyright law to new technology- and then leading the transition to the new platforms. ..... Studios are run by financial managers who have no corporate DNA to exploit disruptive innovation

I think of the Internet as one big farm. It is the farm that feeds you mindfood. Movies are mindfood. Of all technologies that were ever invented for the creation and consumption of mindfood, the Internet is the best by a wide margin. The movie executives fighting the Internet is farmers saying keep me away from the farm. What kind of farmers are these people?