Hollywood’s Last Stand: The Desperate Plot Behind The SOPA Opera

Look back at any period of rapid technological progress and you’ll find two groups of individuals: Pioneers tirelessly charting new territory for the benefit of the species and members of the old order standing against the tide to fight back the phantom of their own perceived obsolescence. The debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act boils down to exactly this—a desperate last-ditch effort by the reigning Hollywood and recording industry elite to preserve their crumbling empires, no matter the cost to free speech, innovation and security.

It’s not the first time this has happened, and it certainly won’t be the last. Jump back a hundred or so years to one example famously cited by copyright law professor Lawrence Lessig, in which American march composer John Philip Sousa speaks out against a machine called the gramophone that played recorded music without the need of live musicians.

“When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs,” Sousa said at a Congressional hearing in 1906. “Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.” Ironically, he was rallying against the very recording industry that went on to rally against recordable cassette tapes, and is currently rallying against the internet.

Like Sousa’s odd statement, SOPA’s overreaching and blunderous approach to combating online infringement of copyright is deeply mired in outdated ideas about the nature of technology and the economics of creative work. But it’s important to remember that the incumbent institutions pushing it forward simply don’t care. To them, the individual empowerment offered by ubiquitous computer networks is an obstacle that must either be shaped to their benefit, or destroyed outright. SOPA does a little bit of both.

But to the booming culture of internet startup businesses, arguably one of the only sectors of the American economy that isn’t hurting badly right now, the nature of the internet has generated a renaissance of networked creativity. Many web trailblazers, like Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler, see the conflict as the symptom of a generational disconnect between old media titans and internet age innovators. “It’s people who grew up on the Web versus people who still don’t use it,” he wrote while explaining his views to David Carr in the New York Times. “In Washington, they simply don’t see the way that the Web has completely reconfigured society across classes, education and race. The Internet isn’t real to them yet.”

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