Jeg vil begynde med dette. Dette er et håndlavet skilt, som dukkede op i et lille familieejet bageri i mit gamle kvarter i Brooklyn for et par år siden. Butikken ejede en af de maskiner, som kan printe på sukkerplader. Og børn kunne komme med tegninger og få butikken til at printe en sukkerplade til toppen af deres fødselsdagskage.
I'm going to start here. This is a hand-lettered sign that appeared in a mom and pop bakery in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn a few years ago. The store owned one of those machines that can print on plates of sugar. And kids could bring in drawings and have the store print a sugar plate for the top of their birthday cake.
Men en af de ting, som børn uheldigvis kunne lide at tegne, var tegneseriefigurer. De kunne lide at tegne Den Lille Havfrue, de kunne lide at tegne en smølf og Mickey Mouse. Men det viste sig at være ulovligt at printe et barns tegning af Mickey Mouse på en sukkerplade. Og det er en krænkelse af copyright. Og at føre opsyn med krænkelser af copyright fra børns fødselsdagskager var sådan et besvær, at College bageriet sagde, "Ved du hvad, vi stopper med den forretning. Hvis du er en amatør, har du ikke adgang til vores maskine mere. Hvis du vil have en printet sukker-fødselsdagskage, er du nød til at bruge en af vores præfabrikerede billeder -- kun for professionelle."
But unfortunately, one of the things kids liked to draw was cartoon characters. They liked to draw the Little Mermaid, they'd like to draw a smurf, they'd like to draw Micky Mouse. But it turns out to be illegal to print a child's drawing of Micky Mouse onto a plate of sugar. And it's a copyright violation. And policing copyright violations for children's birthday cakes was such a hassle that the College Bakery said, "You know what, we're getting out of that business. If you're an amateur, you don't have access to our machine anymore. If you want a printed sugar birthday cake, you have to use one of our prefab images -- only for professionals."
Så lige nu er der 2 lovforslag i kongressen. Den ene hedder SOPA, den anden hedder PIPA. SOPA står for 'Stop Online Piracy Act'. Den kommer fra senatet. PIPA er en forkortelse for 'PROTECTIP' som selv er en forkortelse for Forhindre reelle online trusler imod økonomisk kreativitet og tyveri af immaterialret -- fordi kongesionelle hjælpere, som navngiver disse ting, har meget tid til overs. Og det, SOPA og PIPA vil gøre, er, de vil gøre dette. De vil få omkostningerne til at stige for copyrightoverholdelse til punktet, hvor folk simpelthen stopper med at tilbyde det som en mulighed for amatører.
So there's two bills in Congress right now. One is called SOPA, the other is called PIPA. SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's from the Senate. PIPA is short for PROTECTIP, which is itself short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property -- because the congressional aides who name these things have a lot of time on their hands. And what SOPA and PIPA want to do is they want to do this. They want to raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs.
Måden, de vil gøre dette på, er at identificere sider, som substantielt krænker copyright -- selvom hvordan disse sider bliver identificeret aldrig bliver fuldt specificeret i lovteksterne -- og de vil fjerne dem fra domænenavnssystemet. De vil tage dem ud af domænenavnssystemet. Domænenavnssystemet er den ting, som forvandler menneskelig-forståelige navne, som Google.com, til den slags adresser, maskiner forventer -- 74.125.226.212.
Now the way they propose to do this is to identify sites that are substantially infringing on copyright -- although how those sites are identified is never fully specified in the bills -- and then they want to remove them from the domain name system. They want to take them out of the domain name system. Now the domain name system is the thing that turns human-readable names, like Google.com, into the kinds of addresses machines expect -- 74.125.226.212.
Problemet med denne form for censur, med at identificere en side og derefter forsøge at fjerne den fra domænenavnssystemet er, at det ikke vil virke. Og man skulle tro, at det ville være et rimeligt stort problem for en lov, men Kongressen virker ikke til at lade det bekymre dem så meget. Grunden til, at det ikke vil virke, er, at man stadig kan skrive 74.125.226.212 ind i browseren, eller man kan lave det til et link, man kan klikke på, og man kommer stadig ind på Google. Så det kontrollerende element omkring dette problem bliver den virkelige trussel fra loven.
Now the problem with this model of censorship, of identifying a site and then trying to remove it from the domain name system, is that it won't work. And you'd think that would be a pretty big problem for a law, but Congress seems not to have let that bother them too much. Now the reason it won't work is that you can still type 74.125.226.212 into the browser or you can make it a clickable link and you'll still go to Google. So the policing layer around the problem becomes the real threat of the act.
For at forstå hvordan Kongressen kom til at skrive et lovforslag, som ikke vil opnå sine oplyste mål, men producere en masse skadelige sideeffekter, er man nødt til at forstå en del af baggrunden. Og baggrunden er denne: SOPA og PIPA som lovgivning blev hovedsageligt udfærdiget af medievirksomheder, som blev grundlagt i det 20. århundrede. Det 20. århundrede var en fantastisk tid at være medievirksomhed, fordi det, man virkelig havde på din side, var knaphed. Hvis man lavede et TV show, behøvede det ikke at være bedre end alle andre TV shows, der nogensinde var lavet, det skulle kun være bedre end de 2 andre shows som var på på samme tid -- hvilket er en meget lav bundgrænse for konkurrence. Hvilket betød, at hvis man leverede gennemsnitligt indhold, fik man en tredjedel af USA's befolkning gratis -- 10 millionvis af forbrugere for simpelthen at levere noget, som ikke var for forfærdeligt. Det er som at have en tilladelse til at printe penge og en tønde fuld af gratis blæk.
Now to understand how Congress came to write a bill that won't accomplish its stated goals, but will produce a lot of pernicious side effects, you have to understand a little bit about the back story. And the back story is this: SOPA and PIPA, as legislation, were drafted largely by media companies that were founded in the 20th century. The 20th century was a great time to be a media company, because the thing you really had on your side was scarcity. If you were making a TV show, it didn't have to be better than all other TV shows ever made; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time -- which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty. Which meant that if you fielded average content, you got a third of the U.S. public for free -- tens of millions of users for simply doing something that wasn't too terrible. This is like having a license to print money and a barrel of free ink.
Men teknologien udviklede sig, som teknologi vil gøre. Og langsomt, langsomt, ved slutningen af det 20. århundrede begyndte den knaphed at nedbrydes -- og jeg mener ikke af digital teknologi; jeg mener af analog teknologi. Videobånd, videobåndoptagere, selv den ydmyge Xerox maskine skabte nye muligheder for os til at opføre os på måder, der forbløffede mediebranchen. For som det viste sig, er vi ikke rigtig sofakartofler. Vi kan virkelig ikke lide kun at konsumere. Vi kan godt lide at forbruge, men hver gang en af disse nye værktøjer opstod, viste det sig, at vi også kan lide at producere, og vi kan lide at dele. Og dette forskrækkede mediebranchen -- det forskrækkede dem hver gang. Jack Valenti, som var hovedlobbyist for 'Motion Picture Association of America', sammenlignede engang den glubske videobåndoptager til Jack the Ripper og stakkels, hjælpeløse Hollywood med en kvinde alene hjemme. Det var niveauet af retorik.
But technology moved on, as technology is wont to do. And slowly, slowly, at the end of the 20th century, that scarcity started to get eroded -- and I don't mean by digital technology; I mean by analog technology. Cassette tapes, video cassette recorders, even the humble Xerox machine created new opportunities for us to behave in ways that astonished the media business. Because it turned out we're not really couch potatoes. We don't really like to only consume. We do like to consume, but every time one of these new tools came along, it turned out we also like to produce and we like to share. And this freaked the media businesses out -- it freaked them out every time. Jack Valenti, who was the head lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, once likened the ferocious video cassette recorder to Jack the Ripper and poor, helpless Hollywood to a woman at home alone. That was the level of rhetoric.
Og derfor begyndte mediebranchen at tigge, insistere og forlange, at Kongressen gjorde noget. Og Kongressen gjorde noget. I begyndelsen af 90'erne vedtog Kongressen loven, som ændrede alt. Loven blev kaldt 'Audio Home Recodring Act' af 1992. Det, 'Audio Home Recording Act' af 1992 sagde, var, hør her, hvis folk optager fra radioen og laver mixtape til deres venner, er det ikke en forbrydelse. Det er okay. Optagning og remixing og deling med ens venner er okay. Hvis man laver mange højkvalitetskopier og sælger dem, så er det ikke okay. Men det med at optage, fint, lad det gå. Og de troede, de havde afklaret stridspunktet, fordi de havde lavet en klar skelnen mellem lovlig og ulovlig kopiering.
And so the media industries begged, insisted, demanded that Congress do something. And Congress did something. By the early 90s, Congress passed the law that changed everything. And that law was called the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. What the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 said was, look, if people are taping stuff off the radio and then making mixtapes for their friends, that is not a crime. That's okay. Taping and remixing and sharing with your friends is okay. If you make lots and lots of high quality copies and you sell them, that's not okay. But this taping business, fine, let it go. And they thought that they clarified the issue, because they'd set out a clear distinction between legal and illegal copying.
Men det var ikke, hvad mediebranchen ville have. De ville have Kongressen til at forbyde kopiering fuldstændigt. Så da 'Audio Home Recording Act' af 1992 blev vedtaget, opgav mediebranchen idéen om adskillelser imellem lovlig contra ulovlig kopiering, for det var klart, at hvis Kongressen virkede i deres ramme, ville de måske give borgerne flere rettigheder til at deltage i vores eget mediemiljø. So de gik efter plan B. Det tog dem noget tid at formulere plan B.
But that wasn't what the media businesses wanted. They had wanted Congress to outlaw copying full-stop. So when the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 was passed, the media businesses gave up on the idea of legal versus illegal distinctions for copying because it was clear that if Congress was acting in their framework, they might actually increase the rights of citizens to participate in our own media environment. So they went for plan B. It took them a while to formulate plan B.
Plan B opstod i sin første fuldendte form i 1998 -- noget kaldet 'Digital Millennium Copyright Act'. Det var et kompliceret stykke lovgivning, med mange bevægende dele. Men hovedpointen med 'DMCA' var, at det var lovligt at sælge en ikke-kopierbart digitalt materiale -- men der er ikke noget digitalt materiale, som er ikke-kopierbart. Det ville være, som Ed Felton engang berømt sagde, "Som at dele vand ud som ikke var vådt." Bits er kopierbare. Det er, hvad computere gør. Det er en sideeffekt af deres normale funktion.
Plan B appeared in its first full-blown form in 1998 -- something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was a complicated piece of legislation, a lot of moving parts. But the main thrust of the DMCA was that it was legal to sell you uncopyable digital material -- except that there's no such things as uncopyable digital material. It would be, as Ed Felton once famously said, "Like handing out water that wasn't wet." Bits are copyable. That's what computers do. That is a side effect of their ordinary operation.
Så for at foregive evnen til at sælge ikke-kopierbare bits, gjorde 'DMCA' det også lovligt at tvinge en til at bruge systemer, som ødelagde kopifunktionen i ens apparater. Enhver DVD-afspiller og spillekonsol og fjernsyn og computer man bragte hjem -- lige meget, hvad man troede, man fik, når man købte det -- kunne blive ødelagt af indholdsbranchen, hvis de ville sætte det som en forudsætning for at sælge en indholdet. Og for at være sikker på, at man ikke opdagede, eller ikke gjorde brug af deres evner som generelle formålsberegnende apparater, gjorde de det også ulovligt for en at forsøge at nulstille muligheden for at kopiere det indhold. DMCA'en markerer tidspunktet, hvor mediebranchen opgav det juridiske system med at differentiere mellem lovlig og ulovlig kopiering og bare forsøgte at forhindre kopiering gennem tekniske midler.
So in order to fake the ability to sell uncopyable bits, the DMCA also made it legal to force you to use systems that broke the copying function of your devices. Every DVD player and game player and television and computer you brought home -- no matter what you thought you were getting when you bought it -- could be broken by the content industries, if they wanted to set that as a condition of selling you the content. And to make sure you didn't realize, or didn't enact their capabilities as general purpose computing devices, they also made it illegal for you to try to reset the copyability of that content. The DMCA marks the moment when the media industries gave up on the legal system of distinguishing between legal and illegal copying and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means.
DMCA'en havde og fortsætter med at have en masse komplicerede effekter, men på dette ene område, begrænse deling, har den for det meste ikke virket. Og hovedårsagen til, at den ikke har virket, er, at internettet har vist sig at være langt mere populært og langt mere kraftfuldt, end nogen forestillede sig. Mixbåndet, fanbladet, det var intet i forhold til, hvad vi ser nu med internettet. Vi er i en verden, hvor de fleste amerikanske borgere over 12 år deler ting med hinanden online. Vi deler skrevne ting, vi deler billeder, vi deler lydfiler, vi deler video. Noget af det, vi deler, er noget, vi har lavet. Noget af det, vi deler, er noget, vi har fundet. Noget af det, vi deler, er noget, vi lavet ud af noget, vi har fundet, og alt det forfærder disse brancher.
Now the DMCA had, and is continuing to have, a lot of complicated effects, but in this one domain, limiting sharing, it has mostly not worked. And the main reason it hasn't worked is the Internet has turned out to be far more popular and far more powerful than anyone imagined. The mixtape, the fanzine, that was nothing compared to what we're seeing now with the Internet. We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online. We share written things, we share images, we share audio, we share video. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've made. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've found. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've made out of what we've found, and all of it horrifies those industries.
Så PIPA og SOPA er runde nummer 2. Men hvor DMCA var kirugisk -- vi vil gå ind i din computer, vi vil gå ind i dit fjernsyn, ind i din spillekonsol, og forhindre det i at gøre, hvad de sagde i butikken, det ville gøre -- PIPA and SOPA er nukleare, og de siger, vi vil tage alle steder hen i verden og censurere indhold. Så mekanismen, som jeg sagde, til at gøre dette er, at man er nødt til at nedlægge alle, som peger på disse IP adresser. Man er nødt til at tage dem ud af søgemaskiner, man er nødt til at tage dem ud af online vejledere, man er nødt til at tage dem ud af brugerlister. Og fordi de største producenter af indhold på internettet ikke er Google og Yahoo, men os, er det os, folket, som bliver kontrolleret. For når alt kommer til alt, er den virkelige trussel ved vedtagelsen af PIPA og SOPA vores mulighed for at dele ting med hinanden.
So PIPA and SOPA are round two. But where the DMCA was surgical -- we want to go down into your computer, we want to go down into your television set, down into your game machine, and prevent it from doing what they said it would do at the store -- PIPA and SOPA are nuclear and they're saying, we want to go anywhere in the world and censor content. Now the mechanism, as I said, for doing this, is you need to take out anybody pointing to those IP addresses. You need to take them out of search engines, you need to take them out of online directories, you need to take them out of user lists. And because the biggest producers of content on the Internet are not Google and Yahoo, they're us, we're the people getting policed. Because in the end, the real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another.
Så det, PIPA og SOPA risikerer at gøre, er at tage et århundrede år gammelt legalt koncept, uskyldig indtil det modsatte er bevist, og vende det om -- skyldig indtil det modsatte er bevist. Man må ikke dele, indtil man har vist os, at man ikke deler noget, vi ikke kan lide. Pludselig falder bevisbyrden for lovlig contra ulovlig udelukkende på os og på de ydelser, som måske tilbyder os nogle nye muligheder. Og hvis det koster blot en øre at kontrollere en bruger, vil det knuse en ydelse med hundred millioner brugere.
So what PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries-old legal concept, innocent until proven guilty, and reversing it -- guilty until proven innocent. You can't share until you show us that you're not sharing something we don't like. Suddenly, the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities. And if it costs even a dime to police a user, that will crush a service with a hundred million users.
Så det er den form for internet, de har i tankerne. Forestil jer dette skilt overalt -- men forstil, at det ikke siger College bageri, forestil jer, at det siger YouTube og Facebook og Twitter. Forestil jer, det siger TED, for kommentarerne kan ikke blive kontrolleret til nogen acceptabel omkostning. De virkelige effekter af SOPA og PIPA vil blive markant anderledes end de foreslåede effekter. Truslen er faktisk denne omvending af bevisbyrden, hvor vi pludselig alle bliver behandlet som tyve på ethvert tidspunkt, vi bliver givet muligheden for at skabe, at producere eller at dele. Og folkene, som stiller disse muligheder til rådighed for os -- Youtube'erne, Facebook'erne, Twitter'ne og TED'erne -- er i virke med at kontrollere os eller være på krogen for medvirkende krænkelser.
So this is the Internet they have in mind. Imagine this sign everywhere -- except imagine it doesn't say College Bakery, imagine it says YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. Imagine it says TED, because the comments can't be policed at any acceptable cost. The real effects of SOPA and PIPA are going to be different than the proposed effects. The threat, in fact, is this inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share. And the people who provide those capabilities to us -- the YouTubes, the Facebooks, the Twitters and TEDs -- are in the business of having to police us, or being on the hook for contributory infringement.
Der er to ting, man kan gøre for at stoppe dette -- en simpel ting og en kompliceret ting, en let ting og en hård ting. Den simple ting, den lette ting, er dette: hvis du er amerikansk statsborger, ring til din repræsentant, ring til din senator. Når du ser på personerne, som medunderskrev SOPA-lovforslaget, personer, der medunderskrev PIPA, det, du ser, er, at de tilsammen har modtaget millioner og millioner af dollars fra de traditionelle mediebrancher. Du har ikke millioner og millioner af dollar, men du kan ringe til din repræsentant, og du kan minde dem om, at du stemmer, og du kan bede dem om ikke at blive behandlet som en tyv, og du kan foreslå, at du ville foretrække, at internettet ikke bliver ødelagt.
There's two things you can do to help stop this -- a simple thing and a complicated thing, an easy thing and a hard thing. The simple thing, the easy thing, is this: if you're an American citizen, call your representative, call your senator. When you look at the people who co-signed on the SOPA bill, people who've co-signed on PIPA, what you see is that they have cumulatively received millions and millions of dollars from the traditional media industries. You don't have millions and millions of dollars, but you can call your representatives, and you can remind them that you vote, and you can ask not to be treated like a thief, and you can suggest that you would prefer that the Internet not be broken.
Og hvis du ikke er en amerikansk statsborger, kan du kontakte amerikanske statsborger, som du kender og opfordre dem til at gøre det samme. Fordi dette ligner et nationalt problem, men det er det ikke. Disse industrier vil ikke være tilfredse med at ødelægge vores internet. Hvis de ødelægger det, vil de ødelægge det for alle. Det er den lette ting. Det er den simple ting.
And if you're not an American citizen, you can contact American citizens that you know and encourage them to do the same. Because this seems like a national issue, but it is not. These industries will not be content with breaking our Internet. If they break it, they will break it for everybody. That's the easy thing. That's the simple thing.
Den hårde ting er dette: vær parat, for mere kommer. SOPA er simpelthen en revision of COICA, som blev foreslået sidste år, som ikke blev vedtaget. Og alt dette går tilbage til DMCA'ens fiasko med at underkende deling som en teknisk foranstaltning. Og DMCA'en går tilbage til 'Audio Home Recording Act'en, som forskrækkede disse brancher. Fordi hele processen med faktisk at foreslå, nogle bryder loven, og så samle beviser og bevise det, det viste sig at være rigtig besværligt. "Vi ville foretrække ikke at skulle gøre det," siger indholdsbranchen. Og det, de vil have, er, at de ikke behøver at gøre det. De vil ikke have juridiske sondringer mellem lovlig og ulovlig deling. De vil bare have deling til at gå væk.
The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA, which was purposed last year, which did not pass. And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA to disallow sharing as a technical means. And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. Because the whole business of actually suggesting that someone is breaking the law and then gathering evidence and proving that, that turns out to be really inconvenient. "We'd prefer not to do that," says the content industries. And what they want is not to have to do that. They don't want legal distinctions between legal and illegal sharing. They just want the sharing to go away.
PIPA og SOPA er ikke sjældenheder, de er ikke afvigelser, de er ikke begivenheder. De er den næste tur af denne specifikke spiral, som nu har været i gang de sidste 20 år. Og hvis vi besejrer disse, som jeg håber, vi gør, kommer der mere. Fordi indtil vi overbeviser Kongressen om, at måden at håndtere copyrightkrænkelser på, er måden copyrightkrænkelser blev håndteret med Napster, med YouTube, som er ved at have en retssag med præsentation af beviser og blotlæggelsen af fakta og vurderingen af retsmidler, som finder sted i demokratiske samfund. Det er måden at håndtere det på.
PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they're not anomalies, they're not events. They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming. Because until we convince Congress that the way to deal with copyright violation is the way copyright violation was dealt with with Napster, with YouTube, which is to have a trial with all the presentation of evidence and the hashing out of facts and the assessment of remedies that goes on in democratic societies. That's the way to handle this.
Men i mellemtiden er den hårde ting at gøre at være beredt. For det er den virkelige besked med PIPA og SOPA. Time Warner har ringet, og de vil have os alle tilbage på sofaen, bare forbruge -- ikke producere, ikke dele -- og vi bør sige, "Nej."
In the meantime, the hard thing to do is to be ready. Because that's the real message of PIPA and SOPA. Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming -- not producing, not sharing -- and we should say, "No."
Tak.
Thank you.
(Bifald)
(Applause)