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No SOPA


Josh

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As the founder of Leadwerks Software, software piracy is an issue that has directly affected my income. We solved the piracy problem by turning our product into a service. Only paid customers can access our community website and get full use of our product. Piracy rates dropped to virtually zero after that. I consider our piracy problem totally solved. The marketplace changed, we adapted to provide a better service, and overall both the customers and company are better off than before.

 

Netflix, iTunes, and Steam proved that paid services can compete and win against piracy sites. Unfortunately, the copyright holders have been resistant to this model. They won't distribute their movies through Netflix, nor will they set up their own movie streaming system. Digital streaming media isn't the future, it's the present. Many copyright holders are choosing not to compete in the marketplace, then crying foul when no one participates in their archaic business models.

 

Why are copyright holders choosing not to compete in the standard distribution model for digital media? It's because they don't want a level playing field. They enjoyed a monopoly on everything you watch, read, hear, and think for decades. They can't stand a free market, which is what the Internet allows. The idea that an artist, product, or idea could become popular by organic means outside their control is terrifying to them. They only want you to have the choices and ideas they create for you: Justin Beiber, Republican/Democrat, and McDonald's.

 

Old media's death is imminent within the next 10-15 years unless they act now. SOPA is about handing the Internet over to old media. I don't know exactly how it will play out, but we know their ultimate dream is to limit you to a handful of "channels" all owned by the same company. This bill has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with control and censorship.

 

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Instead of making sueing for false copyright infringements illegal, they make them legal with SOPA. So basically SOPA is an organized crime.

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As a professional web developer, SOPA and PIPA feels like the biggest threats to my future income.

If people cant legally obtain and run webservices, then I cant make money creating those webservices.

This is a big issue, not just for me, but also for providers of alternate software, even operating systems, that today rely on the internet to not only deploy software, but even develop it!

Imagine a world where software cant be freely distributed. For if the media can shut down entire sites, why wouldnt large software companies be able to as well? And would it even stop there?

 

Im scared....

But is my fears unwarrented?

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We've seen in the past that acts to try to eliminate piracy, only lead to more piracy. Like the DRM protection, it was supposed to be uncrackable, but it was cracked faster than any other protection so far, because it gave pirates a huge motivation to crack it. Any software can be cracked always, that's a fact that will never change. SOPA will only lead to more piracy as well, because that's the way how things go.

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Also that is taken care of. Already today, the torrent sites have changing IPs, which can never be shutdown or tracked. They just are there, forever. You really need to find the solution on mental side, not on technological.

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so your solution is for new businesses and established websites to use torrent sites or constantly changing IPs... yeah... something is definitely mental about that solution... :)

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People who pirate, are not perspective customers, therefore, there is NO lose in income for that product. Therefore SOPA is only about a "screw you factor" and nothing about regaining that lost income. It was never lost. More than that, it a threat against youtube, facebook, and ANY website or company that allows the public to post a comment about anything..

 

I applaud you Josh for taking a stand against it.

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