Yesterday, it was revealed GoDaddy actively supported SOPA – to the point of arrogance and dedain towards those opposing the US censorship law. As a result, a boycott was instated on reddit, which was picked up all over the web. Today, the company rescinded its support for SOPA – but for some high-profile clients, it’s too late. Behold, the power of the internet.
The problem with GoDaddy was that no only did they endorse or even support SOPA, they actually helped draft some parts of it. This drew heavy fire from all over the web, most notably over at reddit, which started calling for a boycott of the domain registrar. Facing that state, OSAlert decided to move its domain (as well as the other 30 or so domains OSAlert’ onwer David Adams owns) away from GoDaddy. We do not want to support a company that promotes US censorship of the web.
Several far more high profile sites and individuals decided to boycott GoDaddy. Only a few hours ago, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Jimmy Wales announced on Twitter that all Wikimedia’s domains will be moved away from GoDaddy. Cheezburger’s Ben Huh also pledged to move his 1000+ domains away from GoDaddy. Joining them were hundreds, maybe even thousands of people all over the web – from people with only a few domains to people who administer hundreds of them.
Some took it a step further. Paul Graham, YCombinator founder and investor, banned employees who work for a company on the official list of SOPA supporters from attending the YC Demo Day. “Several of those companies [on the list] send people to Demo Day, and when I saw the list I thought: we should stop inviting them. So yes, we’ll remove anyone from those companies from the Demo Day invite list,” he stated.
“If these companies are so clueless about technology that they think SOPA is a good idea, how could they be good investors?” he quipped.
Facing this internet-wide boycott, GoDaddy could do nothing but rescind its support for SOPA. “Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s CEO, said, “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”
This, of course, is a big victory for the free and open internet. It proves that if you manage to hit a company where it hurts most – its wallet – you can most certainly wield influence. GoDaddy’s statement is still a little weasily, so I’m not particularly confident they won’t support the next minor revision of the act instead, but at least it’s something.
There’s still a whole lot of work today, but with Christmas right around the corner, this surely is a welcome early present. The list of official supports is still long, and we still have a number of companies supporting SOPA through a proxy (like Microsoft and Apple through the BSA), but this is a step in the right direction.
Hands off of anything that can bring forth this kind of awesomeness.
The problem with this logic is that you will never ‘get it right’. If it can be seen or heard, it can be copied. And it will be copied. And you will NEVER pass a law that will change this fact without breaking the internet.
Even if you are staunchly against piracy, there’s just no changing the facts, I’m sorry to say. Piracy is a business problem, and should be treated as such. Meaning, how are you going to get people to pay for your content if they can get it for free? If you can’t, then you’re finished. Period. End of discussion. You’re never going to sue or bribe your way out of this situation.
Agreed.
They will probably just going to wait a while and perhaps (if we’re lucky) demand some smaller, mostly insignificant, changes. But they still believe in the core principles of the legislation, I bet.
GoDaddy lost me as a customer the second they said they supported SOPA. Turning around because of a boycott is not enough to get me back.
I acknowledge the need for artists to be able to make a living, but SOPA is not the way to do this. I, for example, am working on a system to let you send money directly to the artist. No record companies taking a large cut on the way.
We need to find other solutions. Stop SOPA!
ephracis,
“I, for example, am working on a system to let you send money directly to the artist. No record companies taking a large cut on the way.”
I would be very interested in learning more about your work.
Sure,
Read the blog post about it:
http://blog.stoffiplayer.com/2011/12/support-your-artists-new-way-t…
ephracis,
That’s very cool, I hope it works out. I’m sure most of us would far rather pay the artists directly than to support a record industry which lobbies so vehemently against consumer rights. I do wonder about the legalities though. Even those who’ve donated could still be sued by the record industry. I wouldn’t even put it past the RIAA to sue their own artists to take a cut if they found out. Why do lawyers make it so difficult to do the right thing? Bah.
I find it a very intriguing business model – one that would be fun to take part in. Maybe some of us can help if you have the need for it.
Yeah I thought I wasn’t alone in that regard. A famous comedian here in Sweden recently went to produce his DVDs himself, cutting of all middle men. I think this is the way to go: efficient channels, low prices.
It sure will not protect you against piracy, but we try to give you legal access to free music as well.
Well I hope that most artists have not signed some contract saying that the label owns a cut on EVERY income the artist get, even if it’s donations.
I take any help I can get. There’s like a million things I want to do but so little time.
ephracis,
“I take any help I can get. There’s like a million things I want to do but so little time.
”
I think you should make up a page outlining your milestones and what kind of resources and help you need to get there. That way people can check and see what they can do to contribute. I might like to help with web services or databases or something, but I have no idea what you actually need.
Thanks for the tip. I am working on a pretty big update to the website which includes a new “Contribute” page. I will keep your comment in mind while working on it.
But until then there is a wiki page that outlines some suggestions on work that can be done. But I am willing to hear any ideas people may have.
http://dev.stoffiplayer.com/wiki/WorkToBeDone
I guess one answer to that is by offering people something they want at a price they are willing to pay, the current example being Louis CK.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/business/media/louis-ck-plays-a-s…
I’ve seen some of his stuff on You Tube and he can be pretty funny, but most of it doesn’t appeal to my sense of humor. So I save $5 and I don’t pirate his stuff ; all’s right with the world. (o;)
And he is still, not only doing fine, but making a contribution to charity as a result of the response he got for offering his work on this basis.
How many ‘examples’ aren’t quite so lucky, not granted such opportunity by random dynamics beyond their control, totally ignored …even though some are maybe just as good or better? ( http://www.osnews.com/permalink?501742 )
(also, “something people want” is generally a sad subject, going into cognitive biases, runaway consumption, positional goods, and so on…)
Saw this right after I posted. Not piracy-related but still some ‘new economics’ and thinking outside the box strategizing to provide stuff people want and are willing to pay for. These guys are running a beta aimed at re-doing cell service:
Republic Wireless now unlimited — for real!
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19736_7-57347763-251/republic-wireless…
—
You pay $199 for an LG Optimus S (a small but sweet Android 2.3 phone), then $19 per month for “unlimited” voice, texting, and data.
Why the quotation marks? Republic tweaked the Optimus to use Wi-Fi whenever possible for calls and data, thereby keeping 3G usage to a minimum. It was still available, of course, but users who tapped the network too often could be subject to warnings and, with continued excessive usage, termination of service.
In other words, you could indeed enjoy unlimited everything, provided the bulk of it was on Wi-Fi networks.
That’s over.
—
And from RW themselves:
Unlimited
http://republicwireless.com/blog/unlimited
—
—
It’s a bit sappy, so I won’t quote it here. But check it out if the CNet stuff piques your interest. Their CUI concept, mentioned in the blog article, was based on keeping about 60% of all phone traffic on WiFi with penalties for those that didn’t follow the guidelines.
I am a “member” of RW, but am not part of the beta, don’t have service from them, don’t have one of their phones and am not an employee or relative of one, don’t even know anyone on the service and receive no remuneration or other consideration(s) from them for anything whatsoever.
I read about it on Tech Crunch one morning while on the, uh, ‘Net, reading stuff. ‘nuf disclosure … (o;)
Couldn’t have said it better!!
However, there is a (simple) solution: make it easier to get it legally than it is to get it illegally.
I like the Hulu model, I can watch videos, legally, so long as my internet is strong enough to stream video (it ain’t normally, though…). I don’t mind watching a single commercial between show segments at all, either.
Problem is that I have no easy, digital, way to purchase an episode/movie and attain a good quality digital copy. If Hulu could expand to allow me to pay $2 per episode or less to download a medium-quality (480p) video file w/out any DRM or other tricks, I would much rather pay the money than sit with uTorrent running for hours on end just to find that the quality is sub-par, or it was a TV-rip or a CAM version…
Pay-for-quality & duration:
240p: $0.50/hr (or stream-only/ ad-sponsored)
…
480p: $1.00/hr
…
720p: $2.00/hr
…
1080p: $4.00/hr
No tricks, no specialized formats or codecs, just a web-site offering to download your own copy of a copyrighted work for a given price. Low end versions may have minor banner ads to help fray the expense. Some shows don’t need any more than 480p. I’m paying for a copy AND the download service. Each subsequent download may have a small fee for each additional download, but you have the right after the first purchase to own a copy (at a given quality).
Each advancement in compression or bandwidth upgrade helps the media companies, so we’ll all finally see better internet speeds!! Hooray!!
–The loon
I would too, if it didn’t have ads. Either make it free, or remove the ads. I am NOT paying for ads under any circumstances.
I would as well, if it was available to me.
What about the people in this world who don’t have Hulu, or Netflix, or the full iTunes Store, or Google Music, or Amazon Music, or Rdio, or Pandora, or Spotify. The list goes on. The world is huge. There’s a lot of people whom just don’t have access to legal stuff.
Availability is the biggest selling point.
And also, waiting several years to get access to a DVD release of a series or a movie is not justified. Season 1 of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia was released in Region 4 almost four (4!) years after the last episode aired on FX.
Availability is the key. Even more so than price.
People have survived for hundreds of thousands of years without any of this shit. I’m sure they will continue surviving.
Obviously this has nothing to do with survival.
E.g. the german podcaster Tim Pritlove gives away all of his podcasts for free and can actually make a living just from flattr donations. So this argument is invalid.
It wasn’t an argument… it was a question
Not everybody is going to be able to make a living this way, especially when it becomes commonplace. When everybody is giving their shit away and begging for donations, we’ll see how many people will actually donate.
I think the only way to have a sustainable business model going forward is through subscription services. Well, they’ll actually be more like digital lockers, where you could download as much as you want and keep it, but you wouldn’t want to. In other words, why should I have to worry about keeping track of 20gb of music from device to device, when I can just pay somebody to host it for me. The more artists get played, the more money they make. In this instance, there will be a huge market for ‘discovery’ services. Hence, the automobile replaces the horse & buggy industry
That’s basically what Spotify (together with Last.fm, and such*) already is… still firmly under the control of big labels, people hardly listening to ~indies, artists getting pennies.
(*at least those can recommend not only music itself but also live performances – which often are a better deal for the artists; Last.fm certainly does it, there’s also at least one dedicated to this ~”music social network” which name escaped me at the moment, also UK-based)
Edited 2011-12-31 00:18 UTC
Using singular examples of some rare poster-child like they somehow nullify the dilemma, treating them as able of putting such issues to rest, THAT is “invalid” – at the very least, it’s limited to those who cater to web-regulars willing & able to easily donate. Or – quite a few such poster-children ride on already established ~fame, and the web is ridiculously whimsical in what it chooses to promote …one shouldn’t expect much, only hoping for an unlikely nice “prize” – just like it always was.
(not like I think there really is any sort of solution; IMHO it will largely continue being “rare big stars in the spotlight” vs. “tons of struggling unknown acts with day jobs” – that’s what people seem to ultimately choose, check out top Youtube videos or TPB torrents if you have any doubt)
Better for them to be finished and Internet to remain free.
Just make it convenient not to pirate and I won’t.
Steam did it with games. I bought more games on steam than I ever did on disc. When the option was buying a game on disc for $50+ or pirating it, I pirated it. when the option is getting it immediately for $30, or wasting time on fishy pirated copies, I don’t pirate anymore.
Same with apps on the iPhone. The low prices and convenient purchasing makes me buy lots of things. It’s not even remotely worth my time to put up with ad supported apps or jailbreak and pirate to avoid paying those few dollars for useful apps.
Netflix reduced my piracy significantly. I have no problem paying the subscription fee because it’s so damn convenient. I suspect online movie rentals are next on the list to replace pirating stuff not on netflix. Right now $5 on iTunes still seems somewhat steep though..
VERY good point about Steam — though for me Steam has been unreliable buggy garbage; I can always poke my head into GoG.
It’s a point about the industry as a whole — much like the recording industry the game industry is failing to adapt to what people want — affordable digital delivery. Instead they’re crapping out $140 “collector edition” boxes they’ll sell a couple hundred of, instead of the $20 price it will be sold for in a year’s time anyways out of the bargain bin that they could sell a billion times more of.
Industries that cannot adapt to what the public wants or the current world should be allowed to fall so that better alternatives can take their place, or so that something which is no longer relevant ceases to be a drain upon all of us.
+1 to Steam as well, both concerning its piracy prevention role and horrible software quality.
I still can’t figure out how Valve managed to mess up the Steam client so badly, but it’s still a pretty nice way to get “mainstream” games overall. For more obscure titles, I largely prefer Humble Indie Bundles, which are probably the most awesome form of indie video game publishing ever devised.
Edited 2011-12-23 23:40 UTC
I don’t really understand the draw to Steam myself. I mean, sure it’s convenient, but you’re basically ‘buying’ a bunch of games that you don’t really own and can never resale. When you’re paying $.99 a game on phones, this isn’t really a big deal to me, but when I’m paying $30+, I want some sort of guarantee that I can still play these games when (not if) the service goes offline.
I would, however, be down with paying a monthly sub to have access to all of the games in their catalog. Maybe do it like the Safari bookshelf does, and have a certain amount of games ‘checked out’ at one time, depending on how much you pay.
I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but for some of us outside the USA, getting games at affordable prices is near impossible. No sales, no black friday, nothing. Very few games, overpriced to hell and back.
Steam, with all its problems and limitations, allows me to get original games at prices I can afford
Well, it’s convenient and some games are only available through it. Also, Steam’s DRM is pretty much as good as modern copy protection gets : if, say, your internet connection or Valve’s servers are down, you can just put Steam in “offline mode” and play your single-player games the way you like it. My brother, my parents, and I use that to share a single Steam account, because we consider that not being able to share a game with relatives is plain stupid.
This is to be compared with other retail copy protection schemes such as that of Starcraft II, most annoying one I’ve ever met so far.
Edited 2011-12-24 09:56 UTC
If Steam went away today (and you can simulate this by pulling your plug) the Steam client times out while trying to login. You get a message that there is “no connection” to Steam. All the games work in offline mode.
Of course, any games you didn’t currently have downloaded would be inaccessible, but did you really need ALL of them? I’ve got my CD case full of games that I bought legally and I don’t play. Besides, I only pay around 5 bucks for the games I do buy on Steam, you don’t need to buy it right when it comes out when there is so much awesome content that is only 1 year old at 5 bucks.
I don’t understand this. I have never had any issues with Steam whatsoever and even among my friends the worst problem so far has been that it’s gotten corrupted or something in the memory so that it had to be restarted, and in those cases I can’t even vouch that it’s not just something my friends have done wrong themselves or that there ain’t any malware on their PCs.
Well, here Steam is…
– Extremely slow to start up (like, maybe a minute or something, it’s one of the slowest software on my Windows session)
-Regularly failing to connect to the internet and asking me to login again
-Not able to figure out how to update in the background (or, at the very least, download updates in the background and install them quickly like Firefox does)
-Becoming significantly more sluggish than any other application when the system is under load, probably due to its nonstandard UI widgets
This is happening on two machines, my laptop from 2010 (Core i5 M430, 4GB RAM, Geforce 325M, Windows 7 HP x64), and an older gaming desktop from 2004 or so on which my parents play games (Athlon 64 3000+ (well, more like 3800+ in fact
), 1GB RAM, Geforce 7800 GT, Windows XP Pro SP3).
Sometimes, Steam does perfectly weird stuff too, like failing to install a game properly so that it crashes on startup until some operations are performed. Or “forgetting” the license information of a game, so that it asks for a serial number on startup. Or this one time where the steam online store started spitting billing error on me no matter what mean of payment I chose to use. But these remain relatively rare.
Edited 2011-12-24 09:43 UTC
Hmm, well, thanks for explaining. I can’t really say what’s wrong with your Steam installation then, as I have never had anything like what you’re describing and neither have any of my friends; Steam fires up just fine, consumes quite little resources, doesn’t crash and all the games it installs work just fine — unless there’s a bug in the game itself.
Perhaps your antivirus is screwing Steam up?
Perhaps, as it’s the same on both machines (AVG Free)
Me and my friends use MSE. I don’t often praise Microsoft, but they did real good with MSE, perhaps you should try and see if that fixes your issues.
Trying on win7 without issues so far. On XP it’s more of a mixed bag as Windows Update used to be fare worse than today in the XP age, yet I have to use it now… *shivers*
GoDaddy is just Network Solutions with tits, I still have trouble understanding why anyone uses them in the first place except the ignorant and the inept.
Given that from what I’ve seen, their business practices are just as sleazy as NetSol — their supporting and paying someone to help “craft the bill” is hardly a shocker to me.
Ah…that would be me then. So really simple question. How do I remove my domain (yeah, just one) from GoDaddy and who would people recommend.
Obviously, with me being inept and ignorant I need a step by step (moron’s) guide. As I use GoDaddy to redirect a domain name to my self hosted blog…I don’t need anything sophisticated, so price would be a good decider.
Well, if it’ just the domain name, I suggest namecheap…
Who just bitched that GoDaddy was blocking name transfers to them…
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/26/godaddy-responds-to-namecheap-accu…
I knew I used NameCheap for a reason… I knew I pissed on GoDaddy from orbit for the past half a decade for a reason… Nice to have my gut reactions verified.
All my sites is moved now, 340+ sites. Took em to T3 instead (swedish company that does not support SOPA, ACTA or even IPRED) GoDaddy can GoF**K themselves.
Thank you, David Adams, for moving this and your other sites.
Thom is right – the only place these companies feel pain is in their wallet!
And their recanting of support for SOPA won’t change it. I’m still moving my domains. However, there’s a good reason why a lot of savvy internet people still use Godaddy despite the sleazy upsell tactics and tacky website. If you keep an eye on the deals, it’s generally the cheapest place to get domains. All things equal, I’ll go with the cheapest. But this SOPA debacle suddenly made things not-equal.
I don’t see why anybody should care.
The issue here is that GoDaddy is turning around for the completely wrong reasons. Does anybody really believe that they woke up one morning und suddenly realised that SOPA is bad? That’s ridiculous. If they really thought so, they could have come to that conclusion a long time ago.
No, they would *still* support it if there wouldn’t be such public outrage about it. So their belief is *still* wrong, so there is *still* no reason to further support GoDaddy in any way.
Actions speak louder than words they say, but in this case, the only thing GoDaddy realised is that they will lose customers if they openly support SOPA.
Copyright is a protection any citizen expects from any modern country.
Copyright’s are held by both companies and private citizens and they make money from them. Of course some people think that stealing form companies is OK. It is not no matter how you post it.
My family has earned money from patents and they too should be protected just as any work of art, music, film or thought should be for some time protected by law. Stealing from Disney is just as immoral as stealing from Black Sabbath.
Only a crook would believe that child porn and stolen works need to be on the internet.
Your family should not be protected at a cost of destroying a resource that the rest of the world uses.
You are using child porn as a way to re-enforce your flawed point. Instead of blocking child porn, the people who upload such shit need to go to prison and or mental rehabilitation. ISPs will take down such material with or without SOPA as it is illegal and immoral.
Lastly, copyrights and patents are not the same, your post seems to use them interchangeably.
Why don’t the lazy boob’s in your country get something that we can steal and then maybe I’d steal it.
Since you use the words patent and copyright interchangeably, you are suggesting that people are stealing your ideas or distributing copies whatever work you do without permission?
GoDaddy is known for different kind of indecent behavior, even besides SOPA support, so I’m surprised that such high profile sites as Wikipedia were using their services.
This, of course, is a big victory for the free and open internet.
Don’t think so; rather, this whole affair was designed to feel like a victory.
Now when the next oppressive effort comes along it will be buffeted with a defence from its proponents something like: “We compromised on SOPA, and we’ve learned from our mistakes. Now it’s time for the other side to compromise with us.”
This whole episode will be used as a ramrod to get their slightly-less-egregious agenda passed.