Addie Brownlee (Disclaimer: she’s a dear friend but I love and support her art regardless) is featured in a new PSA (see below) produced in partnership with MTV and carried out by the nonprofit National Crime Prevention Council, the folks who gave us McGruff the Crime Dog.
The PSA is very revealing. It puts to mind exactly what happens when people download copyrighted material illegally. One respondent on the YouTube page argues that “now because of this kind of publicity SOPA is going to? pass… dont be fooled people!”
I would argue that this does not give credence to SOPA. Instead the PSA shows viewers, in an indisputable way, that it is the individual who needs to learn and change his/her behavior and understand the harm that his/her illegal downloading causes to artists. THAT is what needs to change and THAT is what this PSA hopes to do.
Studies show that SOPA’s form of restriction is actually more harmful than helpful in terms of copyright protection. Not only does this study by Sandia Labs show that this legislation is “unlikely to be effective” and will “negatively impact U.S. and global cybersecurity and Internet functionality” but they also express the following concern:
There are also potential consequences to DNS filtering that might adversely affect proper functionality of the Internet. In particular, it is possible that the resolution of some domain names could be negatively affected by the filtering of other domain names under the provisions of the these bills. Domain names often rely on other names to be resolved, and the failure of these dependencies can cause partial or complete failure of the dependent names.
I believe in a free and open internet but I ALSO believe people deserve to make a living from their passion, as Addie Brownlee is attempting to do. To think otherwise is asinine. We need MORE of this type of education, making people understand the problems with illegal downloading and LESS government mandating. I say KUDOS to Addie and the NCPC for putting this campaign together. Education is the key… not government regulation. For more on this please see this Yahoo! Finance article.
Tommy Karr 