The Mu: David Muir's Personal Blog

If you’re in the United States and you’re thinking about getting a big screen for the Super Bowl, be careful.  On any screen larger than 55 inches, if you invite someone over to watch the game, you’re committing copyright infringement.  That’s because the way the law is written, your friends comprise “the public” and that makes it a public performance.

(II) if the performance or display is by audiovisual means, any visual portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 4 audiovisual devices, of which not more than 1 audiovisual device is located in any 1 room, and no such audiovisual device has a diagonal screen size greater than 55 inches, and any audio portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 6 loudspeakers, of which not more than 4 loudspeakers are located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space;

When I first made the leap into my current real estate career, I did a skills inventory and concluded that I would be suited to the job.

I looked at my project management experience and my ongoing fascination with language, including legalese.  I looked at my communications and public speaking experience. Finally I looked at my ability to get technology working for myself and others.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that my earlier experiences in life also come into play in this career: retail sales is an obvious one that seemed so long ago as to be irrelevant (yet it comes up almost every day), and journalism.

Journalism? Yes, I now realize that those skills are very relevant.  I am not the only person with on-air broadcasting experience and interviewing skills to get into real estate.  Lance Chilton and Jim Tatti, two high-profile broadcasters in the Greater Toronto Area are real estate agents now.  Asking the right questions and getting to the bottom of things are critical in any real estate transaction.  Knowing how to frame a story and present the facts are also key skills.

The lesson of course is that your life experiences accumulate to make you who you are.  I’m just happy to have a strong sense that nothing I did was “wasted effort”.

There’s a fascinating infographic that summarizes the long history the Hollywood film studios have with trying to stop innovation.  SOPA is really just the latest round. Click on the image to go to the original site and see it properly.

Since November, when I wrote about the legislation coming through the U.S. Congress and a similar one in the Senate, SOPA has become a household word.  PIPA is almost as common.  OPEN is still quite obscure.  They are all legislative forays with the same goal.  OPEN is the best of the three, but the same driving forces behind the legislation are copyright holders: the big companies that own copyrights.  The laudable introductory text that says “Americans have a right to benefit from what they’ve created” ignores the fact that these days copyright benefits the artist who actually created the work in very few cases.

There are lots of laws on the books that are already used (and abused and abused and abused) to enforce copyright and generally hold people accountable for their online actions.

Meanwhile, Adam Curry postulates that “winning” over SOPA (which happens to be Spanish for soup) and the big Internet blackout that is coming tomorrow in protest of these bills, is nothing but a red herring.

“The Internet is a series of tubes invented by Al Gore.”

If you get the joke references in that answer, then you probably understand all the issues I will try to raise in this post.  But even if you use the Internet on a daily basis through e-mail or your favorite Facebook games, you may be hearing some of the following for the first time.

The Internet is a technological marvel that, as with most marvels, evolved. Now, the timeframe is so compressed that it may resemble intelligent design more than evolution, but let’s just assume that the incremental improvements happened quickly and that there were more than a few innovators involved.  Most people think of the Internet and the World Wide Web as one and the same.  That’s fine for most purposes these days.

What’s more interesting though, as the recent debates about censorship to battle copyright infringement have shown, is that the Internet is actually a belief system.  The way it grew up was around trust and sharing.  It has been abused by spammers and scam artists, but mostly it thrives because of the goodness and fairness of the majority of people.

I strongly believe that people should be compensated for the work they do.  I see the “Occupy” movement’s difficulty with the richest 1% getting richer off the backs of the 99%.  I also see a strong parallel between that argument and the corporations that are the “content industry” getting rich off the backs of artists.  Copyright lasts so long now that it has nothing to do with ensuring that an artist is fairly compensated for their contributions to culture.  It is really a way for people who can afford to control distribution channels to make money off the artist’s work (70 or more years after the artist is dead).  The Queen Anne Statute (when copyright was first introduced) allowed for the artists to get a temporary monopoly on their artistic expressions (not ideas, by the way, only expressions of ideas) so they could make some money and at the same time contribute to culture.  After 14 years, when the artist has made a chunk of money from their creation, the art would fall into the public domain.  There it would be enjoyed by all and (most importantly) re-mixed and improved upon by the next generation of artists.

The Internet brought along the potential for an amazing resurgence of creative talent.  Cheap production and even cheaper distribution could have allowed for artists to create amazing high quality stuff, get it out there, monetize it quickly, and then the next generation would take over.  Instead we have big corporations doing their utmost to lock down all creative output for multiple generations.  The examples that really freak me out are the Walt Disney movies like Cinderella and Snow White which were stories in the public domain that Disney used to build an incredibly successful business; now any attempt by someone to put out content based on those same public domain stories are challenged by the Disney lawyers.  If things worked the way they were originally supposed to, Disney’s own versions would be in the public domain by now.  Remember, since corporations are considered people under the law, the copyright will now last until 70 or more years after the Disney corporation dies.

To stop online copyright infringement, the US government is considering legislation that will allow companies like Disney the ability to cut off funding and “erase from the Internet” any site found to be “facilitating infringement”.  There’s enough ambiguity in the law that Google or flickr could easy be categorized as a “rogue” site. The way they will accomplish the “erasing” is to muck around with the Domain Name System (DNS), the technical backbone of the Internet that converts the Web site name you type or paste into your browser into the IP addresses (numbers) that computers can understand.  The legislation breaks the Internet technically and shatters the underlying belief system.  No trust.  No sharing.

It should be interesting to see how we answer this question in a few years: “What is the Internet?”  If the companies pushing this legislation have their way, the answer may be: “A broadcast medium used by big corporations to deliver content to a paying audience.”  Surely this would be a better answer: “A communications medium that continues to allow each member of the public an equal voice, making it the greatest enabler of democracy and artistic expression the world has ever known.”