> But the other reason is that, for all the reasons that SOPA may be bad, I don’t see people in the technology community making real and productive proposals for how to solve the problems of copyright protection and piracy.
If this is the crux of your argument (and I fully believe it is), then your entire premise is flawed. There are big players making major inroads into this problem already. You might have heard of some of them, like iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon MP3, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Google Market, Steam, and Origin.
You should read what Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve Software, the owner of Steam (which is often credited with singlehandedly saving PC gaming as an industry) has to say about piracy: http://www.gamefront.com/gabe-newell-piracy-is-a-non-issue/
The solution isn't DRM, or dispatching special ops to assassinate teenagers who pirate Ke$ha music, or giving corporations an internet killswitch. The solution isn't even to eliminate piracy. You can't, and you'll never be able to. Beyond that, you don't even need to eliminate piracy. What you want to eliminate is lost sales. There's a lot of conflating piracy and lost sales, especially by the content producers, and it's utter bull.
If Newell is correct (and I have every reason to believe that he is), then the way you capture sales lost to piracy is you establish distribution that is easier and more accessible than piracy, and people will use it. The "they wouldn't buy it anyway" argument is old and tired, but there's a nugget of truth in it - there are two general classes of content pirates; those who would buy the item, but for whom piracy is more convenient, and those who wouldn't buy the item, and take it because they feel entitled to it. There's a third, smaller class, who would buy items, but lack the finances to do it, but it's arguable that that's not a lost sale, and in all three cases, you're still achieving greater distribution, which does make at least some contribution to your product's success, however nebulous. That's not to make an excuse for piracy, but I firmly believe it to be a reality of any form of content distribution.
The consumers have proven over and over again that we'll legitimately buy things if there are easy, convenient ways to get them legitimately. You generally lose sales to piracy when it becomes easier to pirate content, not when it becomes cheaper. I would argue that the majority of piracy is about convenience moreso than it is about money. The solution isn't to make it less convenient to be legitimate (hi, DRM), but more convenient, and all of a sudden, you find yourself recapturing those lost sales.
If this is the crux of your argument (and I fully believe it is), then your entire premise is flawed. There are big players making major inroads into this problem already. You might have heard of some of them, like iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon MP3, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Google Market, Steam, and Origin.
You should read what Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve Software, the owner of Steam (which is often credited with singlehandedly saving PC gaming as an industry) has to say about piracy: http://www.gamefront.com/gabe-newell-piracy-is-a-non-issue/
The solution isn't DRM, or dispatching special ops to assassinate teenagers who pirate Ke$ha music, or giving corporations an internet killswitch. The solution isn't even to eliminate piracy. You can't, and you'll never be able to. Beyond that, you don't even need to eliminate piracy. What you want to eliminate is lost sales. There's a lot of conflating piracy and lost sales, especially by the content producers, and it's utter bull.
If Newell is correct (and I have every reason to believe that he is), then the way you capture sales lost to piracy is you establish distribution that is easier and more accessible than piracy, and people will use it. The "they wouldn't buy it anyway" argument is old and tired, but there's a nugget of truth in it - there are two general classes of content pirates; those who would buy the item, but for whom piracy is more convenient, and those who wouldn't buy the item, and take it because they feel entitled to it. There's a third, smaller class, who would buy items, but lack the finances to do it, but it's arguable that that's not a lost sale, and in all three cases, you're still achieving greater distribution, which does make at least some contribution to your product's success, however nebulous. That's not to make an excuse for piracy, but I firmly believe it to be a reality of any form of content distribution.
The consumers have proven over and over again that we'll legitimately buy things if there are easy, convenient ways to get them legitimately. You generally lose sales to piracy when it becomes easier to pirate content, not when it becomes cheaper. I would argue that the majority of piracy is about convenience moreso than it is about money. The solution isn't to make it less convenient to be legitimate (hi, DRM), but more convenient, and all of a sudden, you find yourself recapturing those lost sales.