Where It Hurts

Marco Arment and MG Siegler have a point when they say that SOPA is inevitable. Public outrage in America is like a videogame superweapon: it destroys anything in its path, but it can only be used sparingly. Unfortunately, unlike the average citizen, lobbyists are paid to be relentless.

Marco’s suggestion to not watch MPAA videos is the right idea, but not the best approach. A more practical way to ruin the MPAA and RIAA, however, is something that the tech industry is better positioned than anyone else to pull off.

The MPAA is an association of old-school content distributors more than anything else. Who else has content distribution networks? Apple, with iTunes and the Apple TV. Microsoft, with Xbox Live and the Zune store that backs that up. Google, with their Google TV. Netflix. Amazon. Hulu. Roku and Boxee, even. The fatal flaw in all of them is that the MPAA and RIAA provide the content.

Let’s leave the US government out of this, and assert that the greatest enemy to the Web - and therefore to the companies that rely on it - are the MPAA/RIAA. Given that, it would only make sense for the tech industry to remove their reason for existence. They can offer artists better deals for their music. Offer moviemakers bigger budgets. Offer to buy seasons of TV shows. They can become the new all-in-one distributors and compete directly with the recording industries.

Those industries would cut them off from their content to try to stop them, but they’re making one hell of a gamble: that a smaller music and movie selection is worse for the tech industry than having the internet seriously disrupted. Perhaps for Apple and Amazon this is a hard choice, but it should be a no-brainer for Google and Microsoft. And Netflix is already up to no good. We’ll see what comes next soon enough.