White House Responds To SOPA, PIPA, and OPEN

eefsee writes "The White House today responded to two petitions with a statement titled 'Combating Online Piracy while Protecting an Open and Innovative Internet.' They note that 'We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet.' In particular, they cite manipulation of DNS as problematic. But overall the statement is clearly supportive of anti-piracy efforts and lays down this challenge: 'So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don't limit your opinion to what's the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what's right.' So, what's right?"

Comments

What's Right

[Anonymous Coward]

What's right is to stop passing legislation to bandage up the entertainment industry's ancient, bloated, rotting business model. Make it easy for people to buy music/movies/tv shows inexpensively-- and without DRM-- and the problem will solve itself. As long as pirating a movie is 100x easier than buying a Bluray and sitting through hours of previews and FBI warnings, piracy will continue despite legislation. Give us real digital copies of movies for sale, not DRM-infested WMV files that we can only play on one Windows machine with Internet access. Give the people what they want and they will empty their wallets in your direction.

Re:Abolish IP

[Fusselwurm]

And in one fell swoop you abolish the entertainment industry.

So what. Industries that weren't profitable anymore have been lost in the past, yet somehow the world continued without them. And actually, it wouldnt even been lost; only the part of it that does the content copying (ie distribution) would be lost. Artists would still make music, give concerts, paint pictures and do movies. Budgets will be reduced, but heck... the whole point of the entertainment industry is, well, entertainment, and I for one probably would feel quite entertained on lolcats and self-produced music alone ^^

Re:It isn't that complicated

[hairyfeet]

I'll give an even better example...Steam. Steam DRM is trivial to bypass for anyone but the simplest Billy Joe Bob (which is what the original DRM like CD checks was for, to get rid of casual piracy) and hacked Steam games are all over P2P yet Gabe from Valve is singing "Merry Xmas to me" while swimming in a giant pool full of money like Scrooge McDuck, why? Because he learned the way to turn pirates into customers isn't pile on the DRM and hoop jumps but to make it easy, simple, and cheap. We humans are lazy creatures by nature and if you make something simple enough and cheap enough it becomes more of a PITA to pirate than it does to simply buy it and Valve seems to get that.

Take my own case for example, I probably spent a good $200 this Steam Xmas sale between me and my two boys. Now was there a SINGLE game, even one, that I couldn't have pirated trivially? Nope in fact I could have simply used the listings on Steam and went and downloaded every single one if i desired, so why didn't I? Because Valve has made it as simple as "whip out CC, push button, get game" and their download speeds are insanely fast compared to most P2P, most of the games i bought were bundle packs where I got a pile of games in a series for one low price (such as FEAR 1 & 2 & the DLC extras for $5)or a game with ALL the DLC (which the pirated version never has, such as Just Cause II with all the DLC included for $7) and unlike the pirated version I can enjoy full MP support, I get the game automatically updated to current, I get Valve's excellent long tail game support (Such as their throwing in HL:DM when I bought the complete HL2 series which is STILL highly populated after all these years) and it even keeps my graphics drivers updated without me having to bother.

The way you kill piracy isn't with a stick but with a cookie, and by finding the sweet spot on price that gives you maximum sales. look at how just as an experiment the sold L4D for $2 and ended up making over 1700% PROFIT on the title simply by having everyone buy the thing while not having to pay for advertising or making copies. Even at that ultra low price because of the massive economies of scale they got they not only made such huge profits but now everyone of those people will see the DLC for sale as well as the news of the latest L4D games thus making it easier to sell even more content.

So if companies would just accept the mantra of keep it simple, easy, and cheap, put in the most simple of DRM, just to keep Billy Joe Bob from passing around copies to all his buddies, they could be making mad piles o' cash instead or trying to assrape the entire Internet with SOPA and the like. For an example of a company that didn't "get it" look at MSFT, for about 7 months I saw NOTHING but legit versions of Windows and in a small shop that's unheard of, so why did it happen? At $50 a copy the win 7 HP upgrade made it cheaper and less hassle to buy Windows than it was to pirate and $50 appears to be the sweet spot for Windows Home. Sure enough Ballmer kills the program and not 30 days later I start seeing Win 7 Ultimate everywhere because folks simply weren't willing to pay $100 for home and if they are gonna pirate why not get the biggest SKU? Make it simple, easy, and cheap, find the sweet spot on price and people WILL buy simply because its the easiest route. Throw in a couple of bonuses that pirates don't get like DLC and MP and it becomes a no brainer. I mean when I get both Max Paynes for $2.75, Butcher Bay remade in HD AND Dark Athena for $5, and JC II with over a pages worth of DLC for $7 why would I bother to pirate?