Ashton may be right about SOPA but he's wrong about the DMCA, and failure by the tech community to recognize the shortcomings of the DMCA is why media companies continue to take it upon themselves to propose new legislation that overreaches. The first step toward avoiding bills like SOPA is to recognize that the DMCA is not working, and then work together to fix it.
The problem with the DMCA is that not only are you asking artists, authors, independent labels, publishers and others to police the entire internet for their content, but there is no penalty for sites based on widespread infringement across multiple parties. Most of these companies and content creators do not have the means to sue these companies individually, nor would it be equitable. So, you get sites like Grooveshark who respond to takedown requests, then let the content go back up, then take it down, then let it go back up. No individual content creator or independent label has the means or motivation to sue them, and there is no penalty for infringing on a massive scale because there are only civil penalties. Only when the major labels no longer find it funny is there potential recourse, and then only for those labels, even though a massive amount of the value that was taken was from other creators. In the meantime, a massive business was built on the backs of copyrighted material - and they're right here in the US.
The route to addressing the shortcomings of the DMCA is two-fold:
- Centralize the way in which takedown requests are issued, tracked, processed and tallied. Score companies based on their compliance history and penalize them for repeat violations of the same content without requiring the content creator to drag them into court. Leverage government resources to penalize these companies and distribute the monetary penalties to all those who had to issue multiple takedown requests.
- Recognize that there are companies whose sole purpose is to provide access to infringing content, and that protecting the rights of content creators is more important than protecting the rights of these low-value companies. Once you've defined a very high threshold for identifying these parasitic companies, be prepared to shut them down.
Until these things happen, and also until the tech community stops defending piracy under the misguided banner of "free information", you're going to keep getting SOPA in its various forms year after year. Let's stop waiting for that to happen, and fix the DMCA.
I wrote more about that here: http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/a-real-alternative-to-s...