In response to #Open, while it is better then SOPA, it still suffers from the same fundamental problems…legislating to stop piracy isn’t the answer. Its already against the law…

About to make millions on the Facebook IPO, Mike Schroepfer’s lineage points to Reactivity, the poster child for 1990s style Silicon Valley Incubator that brimmed with top talent but failed to cash on incubation. Pivoting itself into a product company to be acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007, it also produced a lesser known mafia that created Mike among others:

Mike Schroepfer: VP Engineering Facebook, VP Engineering Mozilla, Founder CenterRun (a Reactivity company) that was acquired by Sun Microsystems. Stanford University.

Akash Garg: CTO Bebo, Founder of hi5 Networks, Architect at Reactivity. Stanford University.

John Lilly: Partner Greylock, CEO of Mozilla, Founder/CEO/CTO Reactivity. Stanford University

Brian Axe: Director Google, Founder Zaplet (a Reactivity company), EIR Reactivity. Stanford University.

Brian Roddy: SVP Engineering Jive Software, Director Cisco, Founder Reactivity.

Graham Miller: Founder Marketcetera, Market maker Jane Street Capital, Architect Reactivity. Stanford University.

Aaref Hilaly: CEO Clearwell Systems, Founder/CEO CEnterRun, EIR Reactivity.

Bryan Rollins: GPM Atlassian, Director Dell, VP PM MessageOne, Founder Reactivity. Stanford University.

Oltac Unsal: Investor World Bank, SPM Microsoft, Founder TZero Technologies, Senior Manager Cisco Systems, EIR Reactivity. Stanford University.

I would add as #8: don’t fret and be afraid to show weakness. It makes you more believable and authentic. Of course, it has to be honest. Which makes #9: be honest. Better to be honest and have it fail right away than be stuck with a failing partner (and business).

Now that you have been a VC for about a year, I’m sure your view on initially contacting a VC has changed as well. What are a few tips you wish you had understood when it comes to getting in contact with investors when you were the one initiating the contact?

I’m an artist and I un-approve SOPA/PIPA and anyone trying to support control over people’s lives.

Bravo!

Have you considered #OPEN? Personally, it is as far as I can see government getting involved in the fight against piracy. (More here: http://bit.ly/xq0JOV)

These days, I don’t know if we can assume that the right thing happens; therefore, when you have your voice and you feel strongly about something, use it. In this case, these bills affect our first amendment rights. I think that’s as serious as it gets.

I’m glad you used your voice and I hope you continue.

The essential thread in your tale is that the pirate lives outside the reach of the law under which you live. The Internet creates the possibility of crime across jurisdictional borders, which is not well handled by present legal assumptions. An international agreement has a better chance of combating this problem. But it still has to be a *sane* agreement … not, say, ACTA, which is indeed “international,” but like SOPA is just not sane.

I think there are also plenty of online communities and other forums for exposing a plagiarist. I know BoingBoing, for one, has frequently taken Urban Outfitters to task for just that.

Now, if it’s a remix of your design, maybe that isn’t a complete ripoff.

It also depends on how much of your time and other resources you invest in your content, and how much you want to spend policing your content.

If you aren’t yet established, but you are still paying the bills with your content, maybe the problem isn’t as big as it seems?

Once again I have to agree 100% with you. From all I’ve seen, that’s true in most countries (looking at democracies at least – in other systems, citizenry helping the government there is probably not a topic anyhow).

From my experience with having been active in a political party at “low levels” at least, I also think that many politicians would very much appreciate finding solutions in this area, but they are just about as clueless as us on how to get to such solutions. Maybe it’s time for agile developers and politicians (or their advisors) to work together on strategy and try to find some way to bring those philosophies together.

John – I want to thank you for your level-headed comments on this issue. As the owner of an internet company who relies on DMCA protections, and as someone who understands the value of due process, I must oppose SOPA. But as a musician, artist, and evangelist for the music community, and someone who gladly pays for all the content I want to own, I feel obligated to stand up for the rights of artists. In doing so, I find myself at odds with a community of technologists who refuse to admit that music and movies are more than “ideas” that should be freely spread around the world. It seems that you can’t have a differing opinion without being labeled a Luddite. And by simply standing for the rights of artists, it seems easy to alienate the tech community, which is an unfortunate environment to be in.

I have been saying since the SOPA debate began that the real problem, to me, is that the technology community does not step up to address piracy until it’s time to oppose legislation like SOPA. When there is not overreaching legislation on the table, most act as if there is no problem. They leave developing solutions to the media industry, who has no incentive to place reasonable burdens on themselves in their own legislation, and will continue to propose things that infringe on our rights until something passes and we’re all the worse for it.

As an exercise I took it upon myself to write an alternative concept last month that involved creating a central agency for handling DMCA takedown notices and resolutions, with scores for infringing companies and abusive rights holders, with steep penalties for being mass infringers on either side. I think the best thing that anyone can do in this situation is what you’ve done – admit that you don’t know all the answers, but that you recognize there’s a problem, and that just saying no to one side’s proposed solution isn’t getting us anywhere. The next step, to me, is to encourage people who have the most to lose and gain in this situation to work on this issue when it’s not life or death, when there is room for debate and an opportunity for cooperation. Waiting until there is a bill in front of Congress raises the stakes and makes it impossible for both sides to engage in productive discourse.

Thanks again for putting yourself out there about this. It’s important to both sides, even if they don’t see it.

I assume you didn’t mean the terms in that sense, of course. But using them muddies waters which already suffer from too little clarity.

As far as Google goes, being against SOPA seems entirely in their interests given their ownership of YouTube. But I do think their support is due to more than that, and probably substantially comes from it being the “right” thing to do, as well.

Other than that, however, I completely agree with this post and the previous one. Content creators have a valid beef; SOPA’s just an overreaction. Unfortunately I don’t have any clearly better ideas than just doing nothing, so thus far I’ve basically felt like it’s mostly useless for me to try to say any more. The way the Internet completely ignores existing political governance boundaries means that I don’t see any good solution that actually addresses the real problem: the states that don’t protect IP in some way that lets content creators get a reasonable amount of respect. (“reasonable” is eminently debatable, of course, but I think everyone can agree it’s more than the nothing they get in various quarters now.) Which is why, all things considered, I’m ecstatic that it’s not my problem to solve directly. (Cold comfort as that may be if, but hopefully not when, Congress eventually screws it up.)

If I were a lawmaker with no strong ties to either industry, I would be confused at best and probably leaning towards the model I understand better (i.e. the more traditional arguments, which seems to be the content ones). And I’d probably be angry at all this bickering and the lack of constructive proposals or compromises that everyone could swallow.

I can understand why the creative caste prefers the current situation where they can be paid over and over for working once. I’m sure anyone would love that arrangement. I don’t demand any change to that situation (I don’t have that authority, obviously), but I’d bet that (for digital content) it isn’t tenable long-term. I could be wrong, please use whatever methods work for you!

With some caveats, though: I don’t agree that anyone ought to monitor my network usage, that law enforcement and tax dollars should be used to protect one business method over another, that blacklists should be maintained, that households should be collectively punished with digital excommunication, or that abusive takedowns should go unpunished. That sort of thing.

I can’t really control this either, but I don’t think that my objections are unreasonable, and I don’t see how charging per digital copy is sustainable without creating a vast, authoritarian police state to enforce artificial scarcity. And I’ve been listening for one for quite a while.

“[pirated] downloads… should be viewed as sales the content providers walked away from”. Says who? You have your head deep in the sand if you think most piracy is anything other than “When I want something, I don’t want to pay for it” (“Been Caught Stealing”, Jane’s Addiction). As such, unlike consumers voting with actual money, piracy does little to reward companies that price reasonably and treat their customers fairly.

Arggghhh, thanks for showing the clueless, harmful, inane conversation that Mr. Lilly decries.

It’s obvious that artists now have multiple worldwide friction-free delivery mechanisms, ranging from “busking” to digital downloads to conventional physical media. And then jackbooted fascist thug a**hole pirat — sorry, here we go again — copyright infringers somehow twist that around in their sick perv — sorry! — to demand ALLl artists “get with the times”, accept rampant piracy, and compete with it by giving their work away for free or for whatever pittance this month’s hot startups are offering for content. Instead of celebrating the vast troves of Creative Commons, out-of-copyright, sample, sponsored, streamed, trial, unrestricted, etc. material available for $0, many techies scorn any artist who dares to assert “That’s all great, but it’s not for me; if you want to access my work you can pay for it on MY terms.” And the discussion goes nowhere, as Lilly points out.

I’m a content creator myself, with a couple of thousand pretty decent travel photos online, and I care about these not being reused unasked for. Every other week, I see my photos being embedded out of context by a new tech startup (or by a new version of a big website by established names like Microsoft). And then I (sometimes) send them a polite email informing them that I’m not okay with that, and (always) use the technological measures already at my disposal to stop to it.

I’d love it if there was someone representing people like me willing to start an industry-wide conversation with tech companies. Access-Control headers for images, Yet Another standardized file like robots.txt that I could use to indicate my preferences, whatever. I’m not calling techies any names, and I bet that there’s _very_ few content creators who do either, even amongst those who _are_ represented by the big publishers.

When did we let the middlemen get so much power?

The problem is with those that after all these years, can’t accept that their business has to adapt to changing times. Look at the recording industry – how many millions did they spend, trying to crush sites like Napster, before Apple managed to convince them that they could make money selling music online. But the music industry should have been the ones pioneering that stuff – not desperately fighting it until someone else shows them the way…

And that’s the mindset of many of the pro-SOPA organisations. No vision, no interest in how new technologies and social changes can be business opportunities for them. It’s all about preserving the status quo, instead of looking for where the *next* revenue stream could come from…