I’ve written a good bit about the SOPA and PIPA bills in Congress, but I haven’t written much about the proposed alternative, the OPEN Act. OPEN, which is being drafted to do what SOPA and PIPA claim to do, is the brain child of Darrell Issa, one of the more outspoken opponents of SOPA and PIPA.
There’s no doubt: OPEN is a step in the right direction. I still have some problems with OPEN, but it is much better than SOPA or PIPA. Here’s a rough breakdown of what’s good about OPEN.
OPEN leaves Internet technology alone. All that stupidity about hijacking DNS and search engine censorship? Gone. OPEN removes the ability for government tampering of the Internet, which is most definitely not a bad thing.
OPEN allows for due process. I’ve seen some commentary that says it’s not enough due process (I’m no lawyer, so maybe they know better than me), but there is a return to the concept of due process. It gives a website like YouTube the ability to react and remove the offending content without the company losing the web site altogether.
Overall though, OPEN is still not perfect. It still allows for the interruption of cash flow to a business. While that might be ok if all of a business’ sales were infringing copyrights, it could also stop cash flow for legitimate online sales. That’s not all that’s wrong with the concept, but that’s the big issue that jumped out at me.
I go back to what I’ve said before. This whole issue of piracy is a delivery problem and can be largely solved by publishers willing to think outside the box a little bit. There’s a lot of money to be made without involving the government in all of this if the publishers would open their eyes and look for it.
The protectionist, draconian measures being discussed in this legislation will kill jobs and creativity (without doing much to prevent piracy) even if they remove the parts of the bill that would kill the Internet.
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