John Zeitler

I almost never remove posts from the main page, folks, but you may have noticed that the post from yesterday afternoon– titled “Your Moment of Zen”– is no longer there. There are two reasons for this. First, I later discovered that the vagaries of the news reporting cycle tends to muddle the times when certain facts are reported, and it’s entirely possible that the ESA’s statement of withdrawing support didn’t actually come after SOPA was declared dead. That’s the main reason why I wanted to pull the post down.

The second reason is that I hate politics and I don’t want this to become a blog where I ramble on about every little thing that happens in the dog and pony show that is the upcoming election. I said in my closing statement in that post that politics dirties everyone who touches it, and I stand by that statement at least. So, you can be assured that I will try to remain as moderate as possible in this matter as I can.

Allow me to clarify one thing, though: I was not censored and I did not receive even one request to remove the post. I chose to pull it voluntarily, because I didn’t think a cheap shot was warranted. I’m leaving up Wednesday’s post about the two bills, because that’s more representative of my true thoughts than a snarky wag of the finger. If more political reporting was that way– honest and fair instead of getting in every dig against “the other guy” as is possible– I’d feel a lot less antipathetic towards politics.

But since that’s never, ever, ever going to happen, I’ll just go back to my video games and television and leave the dirt to the experts.

The past couple days have shown me a lot about how I operate on a day-to-day basis. It started, of course, with the accident on Friday, but as the situation spiraled further away from the “plan”, I found myself incredibly calm and very well-organized in my thoughts. This leads me to believe that my real special talent isn’t planning so much as it is being able to pull solutions out of thin air every single time I’m hit with a setback.

I’m not exactly sure about this, but I think it means that I need to find room on the ol’ Zeitler family crest for a wing and a prayer.

Today is January 18th, 2012. You may have noticed a few of your standard sites not providing normal service today. I won’t remove my content, but I do need to address the topic that’s presented this situation.

In November of 2011, the United States Congress introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. The goal of the act is, of course, benign on the surface: it is meant to curtail the violation of copyright that occurs on an almost routine basis on the internet. However, the act’s broadly-worded authorities and overtly punitive enforcement measures create the single most tyrannical threat to the protections conferred by the US Constitution’s First Amendment since the day the Constitution was ratified.

To sum up: SOPA would place the responsibility for copyright enforcement on the internet service providers (ISPs) who serve that content to their users. A copyright holder, upon receiving knowledge of infringing material being made available, need only contact the ISP or site administration to have the offending site “black-holed”, or simply cut off from the internet. If the server exists outside the United States, however, ISPs would be required to block access to the site by users within the United States. ISPs will be legally bound to comply immediately and without question. There is no due process involved, no fact-checking, no assurance of fair use rights, no recourse for blacklisted service providers, and no consequences for erroneous blocking.

The fact of the matter is, even if we disregard that the internet is a global resource, this places a tool for restriction of speech that has the force of law behind it in the hands of a non-governmental agent, specifically content producers. Let me restate that: it gives the power of the law to a private entity with zero accountability.

I’m sure this would never be used for nefarious purposes!

It’s not a difficult stretch to see the law being perverted to the complete elimination of freedom of expression rights. Not many people know this, but the speech that practically defined Martin Luther King, Jr.’s career– the “I Have A Dream” speech– is under copyright in the United States until 2038. Under SOPA, an executor of Dr. King’s estate would have the power to erase from the internet any site that bore any significant portion of the speech. Lest you think that this is an unlikely occurrance, recall that under the current US copyright laws– even without SOPA– an entity must actively engage in protecting its copyrights, or else risk losing them and having the work pass into the public domain. Currently, that would mean sending a DMCA takedown notice to the company hosting the offending material; a process that, despite having its own flaws, at least has measures to dispute or bring to legal attention the case. Under SOPA, no matter how well-intentioned that executor might be, he would have no choice but to start wiping websites off the map, regardless of the good intentions of those taking inspiration from Dr. King’s words.

The nightmare scenario, however, is far more chilling. The bill as written could be interpreted to allow content producers to deliver legally-binding takedown notices without judicial oversight. Now, ideally, the content producers would utilize this power to act against all infringements equally; but in practice, applying the oft-stated phrasing of Murphy’s Law that claims “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”, the content producer might be disinclined to press its charges against infringements that show its product in a positive light, and may crack down hard on negative or dissenting opinions of the product. This selective enforcement is tantamount to censorship; imagine a world where nobody could have said, for example, that William Hung was a bad singer. (I’m reaching for an example, here, because I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes for the sake of making a point; also, while I respect him for trying, dude just can’t sing.)

I don’t begrudge content producers the right to protect their work. It would be awfully damn hypocritical of me to do so, as I am a content producer. However, that does not imply that content producers have the right to circumvent the law. Nor does it mean that content producers are no longer subject to the same mechanics of the free market that tangible-goods industries are.

Peter David has voiced a rather interesting opinion on SOPA. Mr. David, who is a well-known and respected science fiction and comics writer, concurred with the general opinion that SOPA’s enforcement language is overbroad and damaging to the health of information freedoms. However, he also claims that the responsibility lies with the public, who both generates the unauthorized copies and consumes them. Without the ravenous demand for pirated works, Mr. David claims, SOPA would be unnecessary.

I certainly respect Mr. David’s opinion, and I agree that there is a significant market for low- or zero-cost works. I must, however, respectfully refute his implication that SOPA, or an act like it, is the only reasonable response to the upsurge in copyright violations. There is an alternative, rooted in the most classic tenet of capitalism: if there is demand, supply that demand.

In 1999, many a person became familiar for the first time with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The organization came to public attention when, in response to the overwhelming success of fledgling filesharing tool Napster, it began filing lawsuits against individuals it believed were the biggest providers of unauthorized copies of music under its oversight. The stories are, by now, legendary: computer-illiterate grandmothers being sued for tens of thousands of dollars in damages; universities taking pro- and anti-filesharing stances; and a myriad of filesharing tools being produced in the meantime, including the now-ubiquitous BitTorrent protocol. The RIAA was also firing back, trying to stem the tide of unauthorized copies displacing sales, but very few of its efforts were successful.

Shortly thereafter, in 2003, Apple introduced the iTunes Music Store, which laid out an ambitious plan: each track would cost 99 cents, and would be (legally) free-and-clear. (We’ll set aside the issue of DRM and lock-in for now, as it is only tangential to the point.) Critics thought that the service would fail, citing the aphorism “Why would you pay for something you could get for free?” Astonishingly, the service caught fire among Mac users, and when it was introduced to Windows users later that year it became even more popular. Rivals such as Amazon and Wal-Mart began offering competing services with lower price points and in some cases differing artist lineups. Soon, downloads were counted for the purposes of “top-40″ charts. Today, iTunes and digital sales are the largest portion of the music industry’s revenues.

The point– and it’s not a socially-outlier one, nor is it incompatible with traditional American values by any stretch of the imagination– is that piracy, be it of music, movies, video games, or otherwise, is a symptom of the supply not meeting the demand entirely. Piracy is undoubtedly a real problem for the entertainment industry, but SOPA and its related bill PIPA is not the solution. History, and very recent history at that, has shown that the solution is not to protect the old business model, but to adapt to changing situations and emerging technologies. The solution is not to tighten the grip on what you have, but to open your palm and let more money in.

In the recent days running up to the protest actions being implemented, many members of Congress and the Executive Branch have issued statements of opposition to the SOPA bill as written. President Obama has himself indicated that he will veto the Act should it somehow cross his desk. The problem is that the bill will not come up for a vote until next week, and that its PIPA counterpart will be in committee until February. That’s plenty of time for people to think that the battle ends today, and for the outrage to subside into apathy. Worse, it’s entirely possible that SOPA/PIPA are Trojan Horses meant to soften resistance to a less-draconian but still irrevocably harmful plan to implement these far-reaching powers, or something like them, without sufficient oversight or recourse. I’ve made calls to my representatives in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and I urge you to do the same.

Piracy is a problem, yes. But tyranny is not the answer.

In case you didn’t notice, I’m having a bit more trouble adjusting to the bus schedule this time around than I usually do. I still want to have daily posts, and if that means I have to backfill them, so be it; however, since I’m not really doing much of anything this weekend (ha ha) I’ll probably use that time to get some emergency Bailout ready for you guys, so that I can at least have something up beyond “I missed a post because I’m an overextended jackass”.

That said, there may be more posts like this one until the end of the week, so please bear with it. Thanks.

Yes, I missed another post. Yes, this is after the fact. Yes, walking almost three miles over the course of the day because the bus drivers aren’t stopping for you is exhausting.

Sorry, folks– long day already, and for the foreseeable future my days start at 4a again. I’ll likely be able to do the disaster write-up tomorrow on the bus. Not like I’ll have that much else to do, really…

So maybe you heard about this, but yesterday I was in a car accident. No injuries to me, but the car isn’t going anywhere for a while.

It came at a really inconvenient time, too, as I was supposed to drive to Cleveland today. Obviously that didn’t happen. I did, however, ride with some folks to West Virginia, which I suppose might possibly be considered almost equivalent, except not at all, really.

So that’s why I have to make this post after the fact, and say that on my agenda for Sunday is the write-up for the whole thing and just try to keep myself from genuine panic.

In an attempt to try to reverse some of the inevitable and irreversible focus decay that the site has been suffering, Kotaku introduced Kotaku Core recently. This is a secondary feed for the site that basically filters out all of the “this isn’t video game news, but it’s related to your interests, we hope” posts that had been littering the main feed.

It’s funny to note that this was unnecessary, as I’d already managed it a year and a half ago when I dumped Kotaku out of my RSS feeds; but perhaps stranger still is that it happened so soon after the departure of certain individuals from the leadership of the site. Makes you wonder.

I hesitate to say it, but it’s alarming me just how much of my use of social media these days has grown since the same time just a few years ago. That in and of itself isn’t scary. What is frightening is that most of my missives on the services can be summed up as “oh God I’m so tired from the thing we all did the past day or so but it was so much fun and totally worth it”.

When exactly did I level up out of “socially avoidant jerkass”?