I Voice wanted to take a deeper look at why the US-sponsored Stop Online Piracy Act has become a part of the entertainment industry’s daily conversation. There is no doubt that online piracy is a menace to folks trying to make a living with any sort of intellectual properties or services, even the owners of I Voice are in agreement with that. But consider that intellectual property and copyright law have always been a tricky legal area, with possession of said property being the best scenarios for business success, whether earned or stolen. Each subsequent modification of copyright law tries to make more precise the legal language to protect the property holder, which in turn leads to more exclusions (AKA loopholes) leading to future unsettling developments like legal ripples on a pond. It’s the classic theory of control in play, just enough control and things run smoothly and society feels generally safe.

Too much or too little control, that’s when things start to get a little ugly. In SOPA, there is a sense that the vague language of the act is a political backroom control deal to effectively clamp down on future revolts against control. At the same time, the world is faced with an ever-increasing array of choice fighting against control-lifestyle, mobility, and commerce all on the front line of this battle - the pace is dizzying due to mass communication coupled with cheap electronics and it is spreading like wildfire to every place on the planet. In turn, these two forces are creating a solipsistic nightmare of global chaos that must have P.K. Dick smiling easy at night.

American software freedom activist Richard Stallman seems to be the only person speaking any sort of non-Orwellian doublespeak in breaking down the crux of the SOPA problem when he says, “These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues. Copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of a work of authorship or art. Patent law was intended to encourage publication of ideas, at the price of finite monopolies over these ideas - a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others. Trademark law was not intended to promote any business activity, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying.”

It’s frighteningly simple and right there for all to see: break the issue apart legally and you’ve created new branches of law falling under different jurisdictions. But Stallman’s activism also led to the installation of free operating systems in over 12,000 schools in the Indian state of Kerala in 2006, and here it’s easy to see why large companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook have a vested interest in keeping laws just as they are and, as such, are totally unamused by folks like Stallman, who they don’t feel is playing by the rules. A change in thinking like Stallman suggests will divide that which needs to be protected by regulation as commerce - works of art - and that which needs to be negotiated under a new definition. Without this willful switching of course, there is no hope of musicians actually get paid anytime soon, and in the future, it will be difficult to assign a value to even the most established artists’ music as it will be artificially deflated, the sure signs of industry death. In a culture where people CAN steal music, everyone will. It is precisely this kind of thinking that must change to save an artist’s continuing path to profitability.

No change in intellectual property laws leads to ongoing global decline and SOPA was written with that urgency in mind, but the same time wants to strike a blow at media organizations like WikiLeaks as an enemy to the market’s best friend - transparency. This is cronyism at its finest and should be viewed with a serious amount of suspicion about its control language. But there is little to do about the growing storm of innovation and choice gathering its chaotic strength, and SOPA isn’t doing anything to address these issues.

How many different, incompatible media players are there, each in its own overstuffed, landfill ready packaging? Or, for the fellow drunks out there, how many different beer bottle and packaging choices do you have on a trip to the store? Where are we going to put all this stuff we've created? The amount of wasteful processes and end products that have delivered nearly every convenience we know and love today are also slowly killing us. Where is the legislation to protect us all from the aftermath of intellectual properties? There isn’t any, and won’t be anytime soon. SOPA may pass, but expect more of the same, a world where the systems of control no longer function effectively due to the strain of chaos and even more stupid laws to come.