Last week, various websites blocked off their content to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills - I’m sure you’ve all heard about it at this point. 

This video offers an alternative perspective on the matter. Will these bills encourage American creativity and innovation? Will increased intellectual property protection in the Internet, which has no formal governance, actually impact jobs in the United States, where most of the content is produced and hosted? 

Source: Subhash C. Jain. Problems in International Protection of Intellectual Property Rights, Joural of International Marketing 4(1), 1996, pp. 9-32. Discussed during lecture with Dr. James Agarwal, Haskayne School of Business, Calgary, AB, Fall 2011.

Increased IP protection leads to increased R&D relays because the information is protected. Doing so increases innovation within firms, and this trickles down for a better quality of life in industrialized countries. 

Weak IP protection leads to more information access, a lack of need for intensive R&D relays, more cost effective innovation, and which then leads to a closer gap between the industrialized and the developing countries. 

While I understand the Intellectual property needs to be protected and should be protected, the advent of the Internet changes things. It converges countries, minds, and capabilities to this community which drives innovation.

Take Wikipedia for example: it is a self-governed website that is a strict on copyright infringement. It’s turned to one of the best stepping stones to acquiring knowledge. (Yes, I don’t cite Wikipedia articles, but it sure is useful when you don’t know what something is! Like flamingoes. I didn’t know they were real until a few months ago!)

Yes, some content will be compromised and there will be lost profits. But until we find a better business model for the music industry (or any industry that could benefit from the internet for that matter), we can’t just censor everything - because hackers WILL find a way around it. They just will. So unless these hackers are also adequately rewarded for their efforts, this battle will keep happening. 

That’s just my thoughts on it.