A SOPA Mess

The basic provision of the legislation, which has caused so much controversy, is that it allows websites to be "shut down" without any judicial oversight, on the mere accusation of hosting copyright material or enabling piracy. I say "shut down"; the actual provision allows for the DNS system, which resolves a website address like "www.gamesindustry.biz" into a computer address like "94.198.83.15", allowing the network to find a route to that resource, to be shut down for specific sites. Were this site to be shut down, for example, it would actually still be on the Internet and accessible at the numeric address, but the human-readable domain name would stop working.

Anyone with the slightest technical knowledge can see how this is largely a pointless measure in stopping piracy - many popular piracy methods don't even rely on websites hosting files any more - but could have huge implications for freedom of expression and, due to the lack of judicial oversight, serious potential for abuse. We already see earlier efforts at copyright protection being routinely abused, as in the steady flow of cases in which copyright holders have unfairly and abusively asserted claims over material on YouTube or other websites which either doesn't belong to them, or is legitimate parody or simple fair use. SOPA would give a much blunter and more damaging tool to the kind of firms engaged in this behaviour.

The ESA withdrawing its support would utterly infuriate those publishing and development executives who rage at their own impotence in the face of BitTorrent and its ilk

Those two factors are key reasons why many of the more savvy entertainment companies have been backing away slowly from SOPA. They are caught between a rock and a hard place, and I have more sympathy than most for the position of organisations like the ESA - which has been left as the games industry's official pillar of support for the deeply flawed bill, even after most major publishers have withdrawn their seal of approval. Few in the games business has argued that SOPA is good law, or even that it'll actually work - but there's a sense of frustration and anger at the scale of internet piracy, and that, sadly, translates into a burning desire to do something, anything at all, to combat the tide of copyright transgressions online. The ESA angers the public and fails to represent many of its members by remaining an official supporter of the bill, but withdrawing its support would utterly infuriate those publishing and development executives who rage at their own impotence in the face of BitTorrent and its ilk.

It's incredibly important, at this juncture, for more moderate voices to be heard. A lot of work has been done in the USA in lobbying a bill to support copyright industries through to this point, and nobody wants to waste that effort, but the bill on the table right now is the wrong one. The solution to online piracy simply isn't going to be a legislative one, at least not in terms of the kind of negative legislation that cracks down on sites and users. There just isn't any technical way of doing that effectively - not without imposing the sort of censorship and invasion of privacy that all of us so deplore in nations like China or Middle Eastern dictatorships. Nobody should be willing to go that far in order to protect the revenue of copyright industries - not ever, and certainly not when there are other ways forward.

Yet with the legislative support of the US government, and of the European Union which will inevitably tamely follow the lead of whatever is passed in SOPA, think what else could be accomplished. Industries need to find new distribution and revenue models, and to weather the storm as they move to systems which discourage piracy or render it irrelevant. Government could support that rather than carrying out pointless crackdowns on offshore websites - and in the process, they'd be helping to build up a new digital economy, which would be rather helpful given the present macro-economic climate.

We have the ear of the US government right now, but SOPA in its present form isn't the right thing to be whispering into that ear. When the UK passed the broken, pointless Digital Economy Act in the dying days of the last government, I lamented that the bill failed to live up to its name - it aimed at supporting old, dying business models in the face of the emergence of a truly digital economy, when it should instead have found ways to help British business to transition to the future in rude health. SOPA makes the same mistakes on an even grander scale. The games business has a unique opportunity to make this bill and the work behind it into a real opportunity for copyright industries, rather than simply another command of Canute, demanding that the tides stop even as the waves impassively advance.