Horses and Stable Doors

Wikipedia shut down recently in protest against the proposed SOPA bill. And it got me thinking about online piracy itself - why is it there? Why is it such a problem?

If you stop to consider the origins and ethos of the internet it starts to make some sense. Look at why we build friendships, why we congregate in groups, why we created local area networks, and why we then joined them together with such enthusiasm. Our desire is simply to share.

Sharing is a good thing, right? We share ideas, we gossip, goodness knows I love Apple's Bonjour protocol because it finds printers, Macs and devices I didn't know I had. And then it lets me communicate with them. I move documents around, I use DLNA to share music, watch films, I use the internet to share ideas, to find out how to repair my car, to laugh at other peoples' misfortune (and marvel at their friends who somehow manage to video it).

At its core, the value of The Internet is only sharing. But we didn't tell it what to share. We didn't differentiate between the pattern of bits making up a copyright-protected audio file, and the pattern of bits making up my Word document. Primarily because we weren't interested - we were just evolving our natural instinct to the world of technology.

So when your business depends on sharing and you charge people for the privilege, you need to be careful. My advice - steer clear. Why would a recruiter publish the client details for all his vacancies? A trader share their deals? A journalist share their sources? And why would a business built upon the premise that sharing 'costs' find a use for the internet?

But wait, here comes the music industry, already making a tidy profit using technology to package up recordings and distribute them - deciding to leverage the internet as a sales channel. Of course, it gives them an opportunity to slash their production costs, revert to their core 'digital' product, drop any 'value add' around gatefold sleeves, picture discs, exclusive special edition booklets - dare I say it - analogue warmth versus digital convenience and massively open up a much wider audience. Now we can start to see their mistake - times have changed, sharing is easier now - we don't need a distribution chain, shops on every street corner, physical media and home-based playback systems - all we need is an mp3 player and the internet. In the blink of an eye, their core business model has disappeared. Remind me - what am I paying £13 for again?

I'm sorry, guys, but this is a bed you made for yourself. No surprise then that much of this noise around SOPA makes no sense. Why would we stop sharing? Why would we censor? Why would we have a problem with people communicating freely?