With President Obama questioning the need for the new Stop Online Property Act (SOPA) and the Protection Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) as with major Internet organizations such as Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist and Google staged what amounted to an Internet strike, Congressional leaders blinked first and backed away from their hard positions.

Late in the day, the leaders of the House and Senate held a press conference to indicate what was effectively a one-day strike by Wikipedia, Reedit and Craigslist had succeeded and there seemed to be no urgency for either SOPA or PIPA. The turnaround came amid growing indications that the online publishing and music industries weren’t exactly happy with the Congressional action. However, as some observers noted, that’s life.

In the last seven years, since the birth of Napster, the ability to download huge playlists of MP3 audio files and share those files with others has become Internet standard. This has led to grumbling from traditional publishers about “intellectual property theft” and the need for protection.

It’s not uncommon for simple tablet users to download or stream huge amounts of data thanks to wired high-speed connections and WiFi. People are using their tablets, Ultrabooks, netbooks and laptops to move gigabytes data around in all of the popular formats including MP3, WAV, WMA, eAAC+, AAC+ and the like, burning CDs or providing net addresses and playlists. They also are programming their iPods with extensive audio playlists.

The interesting part of this is that due to the capabilities of today’s DVD burner, as well as its surround sound and 3D recording capabilities, users are streaming games like “War Craft” and burning new disks. It’s a situation that seems ready-made for Congress to step in and to try to legislate. The only problem is that Congress does not understand the complexities of the problem – preferring to listen to their business friends with their simplistic answers – and this means that, further, you have efforts like SOPA and PIPA which would have turned much of today’s open Internet into a “closed pool” that would have required you to purchase access to sections of the Internet that have remained free.

It’s not that Internet information services would have disagreed, necessarily with the concept of the protecting one’s intellectual property rights. If you read an entry in Wikipedia you will see that it uses academic research techniques with footnotes and full references to all points made. Indeed, Wikipedia goes out of its way to make sure that all of the information it presents is correctly documented and requests that if someone has more authoritative sources to present them for inclusion.

The key, at least as James Wales, Wikipedia’s founder sees it, is the free flow of information on the Internet. SOPA and PIPA would, effectively shut off vast areas of the Internet to users because of alleged “intellectual property rights violations”, whether they existed or not. Once SOPA went into action, some people believe whole areas of the Internet would be declared off-limits. PIPA should work similarly.

Most of the time, the supposed rights violations would be “artistic” rights, owned by an audio publisher or an artist. Indeed, SOPA and PIPA seem to be reactions to the rapidly changing nature of the audio and video industry. A few years ago, the model was pretty much the same, a “talent” would be “discovered” and “nurtured” by a “publisher,” who took a chance on putting the new “talent’s” skills out there on DVDs, CDs or on pay-to-play sites. They retained the “rights to the initial profits” and the “talent” was paid a percentage.

Now that paradigm has changed as streaming media have enabled “talents” to retain control over their product – and yes, they do want protection from people just downloading and running away as there’s no way they can earn anything from their talent – while the “publishers” are losing control. The publishers are leading the charge in having Internet/Web areas declared off-limits and they are still trying to retain control over their talent as long as possible, but that is becoming less and less feasible. Instead, the artist is in control, while the publisher is becoming more or less extraneous, but they still have a vested interest in trying to control things. The same is true in the publishing industry, as well.

Source: http://www.ecommUS.com