It’s pretty hard to imagine someone reading this Web log who would be unaware of the significance of today’s date – it’s January 18, 2012. This is the day that millions of Web sites across the world, including some, or perhaps all, of those on this site’s own blog roll, will go dark in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) and the Protect IP Act (S. 968).
My brother Rob Roy, his wife Katje and their son Jason know where they stand on this issue – they’re all Internet hipsters who sport odd looking eyeglasses (even though they don’t really need them), spend several hours a night engaged in MMORPGs, write iPhone apps on the weekends and wear T-shirts with clever slogans like “Got Root?” And, of course, they’re addicted to arabica bean espresso, covered with tatoos, and have enough body piercings to set off an airport metal detector three feet before they walk through one. They want my Web site to go dark promptly at 0:00:01 Eastern Standard Time on January 18th and stay that way for twenty-four hours while displaying a defiant message, which the three of them kindly took the trouble to draft for me. Moreover, they have spent the last six weeks regaling me with plenty of good reasons to do that, and they’re more than family-argument mad at me right now for refusing to go along with their plan.
Then there’s my brother-in-law Hank and his brother’s wife, Shannon, with whom regular readers of this Web log are also quite familiar. They’re both highly conservative Republicans who, at the moment, are extremely disappointed that Rick Santorum isn’t doing better in the latest South Carolina primary polls. For about the last month, they’ve been hectoring me use this site on January 18 as a platform to debunk the thieves, miscreants, deviates, perverts and terrorists who threaten the Internet, which, after all, America invented; and, yes, they also took it upon themselves to provide me with a synopsis of what to say.
Then there’s my accidental room mate, Veronica, an old college flame who moved into my home in Great Falls, Virginia a while ago after her beautiful but uninsured seaside Malibu mansion – swag awarded in her divorce from a prominent Hollywood producer – burned down during one of the Golden State’s periodic wild fires. Since then, she’s been plying her trade here in Washington instead, and her latest sugar daddy is a K Street lobbyist for the telecommunications giants who are presently attempting to gain an effective oligopoly over the ISP sector. In return for posting what her paramour wants the public to read, she promised me a trip down memory lane to our sophomore year. I demurred. Youth is, after all, wasted on the young, and we were both very young then.
Then there’s my dear sister Rose and my girlfriend Cerise. Neither of them knew or cared about SOPA or PIPA. When first she heard about them, Cerise opined that they sounded like badly chosen names for characters in a postmodern children’s book about lesbian dwarves one might find for sale at a politically correct book store in Takoma Park. Rose, on the other hand, took me aside and asked, “What’s the matter with Hank? He keeps talking about Sopa and Pipa. They’re not… strippers or anything like that, are they, Tom?”
Well, the way I look at it, the Internet is pretty much like any other product of modern science and technology, such as, say, the products of physics or chemistry. Like sub-quantum interference devices, the polymerase chain reaction, cloning, atomic reactors or (d)-lysergic acid diethylamine, the fruits of the Internet are, in and of themselves, neither good nor bad. It is only in our hands – those mischievous primate appendages which distinguish us from other mammals, such as dolphins, with much larger brains, but considerably less portentous apparatus, like flippers for instance, hanging off their shoulders – that such things bring about interplanetary gravity probes, irrefutable forensic evidence, cures for the ancient plagues of humankind, Fukushima Daiich or the Grateful Dead.
And, it must be admitted by anyone familiar with the history of its evolution, in the early days of the Internet, few could find fault with it. In those times, it was a technological Garden of Eden, populated by curious, friendly tribes of innocent Adams and Eves – mathematicians, scientists, engineers, artists, musicians and the like – the Internet, and later, the World Wide Web (invented by a scientist, Tim Berners-Lee), was one of those things we see so often and about which we so often, in retrospect, grieve. Because the truth is, nothing that cool is going to last for very long. Sooner or later, the evil, greedy bastards, the narcissistic fools, the whores, the charlatans, the thieves, the con-men, the bankers, the politicians, the entrepreneurs – in short, the rest of humanity, those who have neither intelligence, creativity or talent, but who are shamelessly possessed only of naked, unbridled avarice, ambition and the animus of animal spirit arrive, not in their hundreds, nor their thousands, nor their millions, but in their hundreds of millions. And, then, boys and girls, you have a huge, nasty, stinking Internet bubble. So, P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute? Big deal – that was 1880. In the twentieth century, there was a P.T. Barnum born every minute, and as soon as they could operate an Internet device, they headed right for the World Wide Web. And what happened? The inevitable – the bubble burst. But did those toxic bozos go away? Not on your life! Having come to the gold fields of the Internet to get rich, they stuck around, long after the gold rush was over, still stubbornly plying their wicked ways.
Given that, is it any wonder those bumbling clowns on Capitol Hill gave us SOPA and PIPA? Ladies and gentlemen, let’s face the facts here – in the Year of Our Lord 2012, the Internet has gotten so hosed up, even members of the United States Congress can see it, and those of you who have read your de Tocqueville know what that means – “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
That’s a quote from the second scene in Act I of a play named Julius Caesar attributed to a fellow named William Shakespeare. Back when he wrote it (as many people, but not by any means everyone, believes) it was called “literature” and there was no such thing as copyright law. Today, it would be called “content,” I suppose, and today, I can use Mr. Shakespeare’s content on my Web site with impunity, because his work (if, indeed, it is his work) resides in a peculiar intellectual property limbo called “public domain.”
So, for example, do the works of Mozart. Imagine what it was like, before copyright protections existed for people like Mozart – composing strictly alone, keeping manuscripts under lock and key, trusting no one, rehearsing in secret – only to see everything you have worked for evaporate on the very night of your first performance, as dictation savants like Antonio Salieri (1750 – 1825) sat in the audience and voraciously scribbled down every note, rather like some punk making a bootleg movie video today. And Mozart, one of the greatest creative artistic musical geniuses who ever lived, was buried in a pauper’s grave. Would a few royalty checks have kept him out of it?
So obviously, it’s easy to argue that people like Mozart deserve some protection, don’t they? And stealing intellectual property obviously wrong, isn’t it? Sure. Unless, of course, you look at what happened with the concept of intellectual property. Copyrights became property, like watches and diamond rings. That meant musicians, artists, poets and writers could be tricked, pressured or outright forced into selling their copyrights to scum bags – and not just any scum bags – scum bags who amassed huge troves of other people’s copyrights, scum bags who owned the revenue streams from the royalties on those copyrights. Yeah, come to think of it, even with copyright, Mozart would probably have ended up in a pauper’s grave anyway after the scum bags got to him. So it’s not like Blind Crippled Lemon-Lime Jefferson Jackson Clay ever got more than a pan of grits and five dollars from the Record Man. It was people like Eric Clapton and the media conglomerates who owned him and his copyrights that made billions from the blues people like Blind Crippled Lemon-Lime Jefferson Jackson Clay created. And that was a long time before there was an Internet. Hell, back before then, even, people like William Randolph Hearst didn’t own no piddling vinyl record presses – they owned newspaper presses, and they ruled the minds of nations with them, for good or evil – mostly evil, as it turned out. David Sarnoff did the same with radio, after he ripped off every bit of intellectual property he could steal from Edwin Howard Armstrong, the man who actually invented it. All it took for Sarnoff to crush him was a platoon of better lawyers – ask Larry Ellison, that’s how it’s done; same difference.
As my talking cat, Twinkle, put it after sitting patiently through a relentless stereophonic argument between Rob Roy and Hank (fueled by a couple more Samuel Adams Infinium than either of them are capable of handling), “Internet nice; people, not so much.”
Which is perfectly fine, provided that I don’t attribute that quote to a particular talking mouse – one who is copyrighted up the wazoo in perpetuity until the end of the universe by a media conglomerate that could buy His Majesty King Croesus for chump change. So, let’s consider the proposition – is it right for copyright-hoarding scum bags like that to come after the mother of some middle school kid who makes an animated cartoon with a character bearing a resemblance to a certain copyrighted mouse in it and posts it on the Internet and sue her for the net worth of her home and bank account? Is that right and proper protection of intellectual property, to send a horde of high-priced lawyers – clad in certain expensive suits, ties and shoes, the names of the designers of which I will not mention, because to do so might get me sued, because those shoes and suits and ties are intellectual property, too – after her, with the purpose of mounting some sort of object lesson for the rest of the peasants?
And how about the patent trolls? Here are parasitic vermin no better than bedbugs, lice or ticks, who buy up intellectual property they would never have the wit or insight to invent themselves. Then they seek someone who has produced some intellectual property sufficiently similar so as to allow their overdressed, overpriced attorneys to convince some jury of ignorant cretins that person, or their business, owes them millions of dollars in patent royalties – all in the name of intellectual property.
On the other hand, here am I, with several very intriguing inventions of my own. I have all of the necessary documentation, proofs of concept, even a couple of working models. But do I patent them? Absolutely not. Why should I bother? To do so would only invite somebody like Bill Gates to steal them, make a bundle off them, then hire some of the aforementioned lawyers and dare me to sue him. Intellectual property, indeed. Clearly, in the present situation, there is more than enough blame to go around on all sides.
So what’s my analysis? It is this: Communism didn’t fail because it is evil. If we were all as good as Jesus or Buddha are generally believed to have been, then Communism would work just fine. No, Communism failed because human beings are not, and never will be good enough for it. And the Internet will not fail because it is evil, either. If it fails, and becomes an instrument of avarice, despotism and oppression, that will happen because, just as there is a Stalin, a Mao, a Castro and a Pol Pot for every Mahatma Gandhi, there are a dozen Steve Ballmers, a score of Rupert Murdochs, a hundred Michael Eisners, a thousand Sumner Redstones, and a billion nameless, pathetic idiots who steal copyrighted material with their computers for every Linus Torvalds. No, if the Internet fails, it will not be because the Internet was evil; it will be because we were not good enough for it. Let’s just hope we can prove, as unlikely as it might seem, in fact we are, anyway. And, permit me, if you will, to be grandiose enough to presume that, just maybe, if the Mahatma Gandhis, Tim Berners-Lees and Linus Torvalds among us light the way, we might succeed in doing so.