Meeting the Buddha.
As far as I know, I have never had my words stolen. No one has ever- to the best of my knowledge- taken my work and either claimed it was their own or simply given away work for which I had hoped to get paid. I can only imagine how devastated I would feel– like a sucker punch to the soul. It’s never happened to me, but it’s happened to people I know, people I care about.
It is, however, impossible to stamp out every injustice. Social problems do not go away, they merely asymptotically approach zero. And with social problems, much like engineering, the 90/90 rule applies. So the question isn’t “how do we kill piracy?”, but rather “how do we mitigate the harm of piracy?” The proposed Legislation “Stop Online Piracy Act” would attack a social mosquito with a nuclear weapon.
I’ve written a lot about memes over the years. Briefly, though, they are the social counterparts to a biological gene. Memes, like genes, can be thought of as having a desire for propagation. They propagate by being fit to survive in a certain cultural milieu. Fire is a meme. Pictures of cats with funny captions are memes. The underlying philosophy of SOPA- indeed, of all asserted strong rights to intellectual property- is that it is possible to own memes. This is flatly impossible. The meme that memes can be owned is a cultural virus that must be eradicated.
Genes do not spring de novo into existence. They evolve from what has come before. A sudden random mutation of a tiny chromosome creates a new genetic expression that may well be better than what has come before. Without it’s progenitors, the new gene wouldn’t be possible. So too with memes. Newton wasn’t just being an asshole when he told a small scientist that he (Newton) was “standing on the shoulders of giants”. He was also acknowledgement the debt he owed to those who had come before him, who’s work he had used as a springboard for his own.
Current American intellectual property law understands this. It “secur[es] for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” It also carves out a Fair Use exemption. People have the right to their own work (for a limited time), but others have the right to create derivative works. People can rent cultural space by being the first to do a particular thing, but others can grab off a piece of that thing and use it to comment on society at large, or on the work itself. We cannot own memes, we are merely the vessel through which memes flow.
SOPA is billed and sold as a method of stopping people from squatting on a meme that society is letting someone else rent. It would do more than that. SOPA would kill fair use. SOPA would create a process by which people or corporations could claim ownership over specific memes, and shut down the sites which host derivatives of those memes. If SOPA passes, it would freeze (and possibly reverse) memetic- and therefore social- evolution.
The understanding imperfect ownership of memes has been under attack for a long time. The Sonny Bono act (and it’s later upholding in Eldred v. Ashcroft) began to assert permanent ownership over memes. With this new iteration- SOPA- we see the assertion of perfect control over what can be done with memes.
SOPA does not solve the problem which does exist, and exacerbates an entirely separate problem. It needs to die. Contact your Representatives and Senators.
