GoDaddy dinged in Hollywood’s anti-piracy war
Hollywood’s never-ending battle against online piracy has a new victim today — GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest registrar of Internet domains.
"The enemy has been sighted off the port bow Capt. Disney."
Everyone’s heard of GoDaddy, perhaps best known for their sexist (not sexy, as Spinal Tap might say) commercials aired during the Super Bowl featuring women in small shirts.
Thursday, opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are boycotting GoDaddy, which was one of the few tech firms to support federal legislation that would require Internet Service Providers to block connections to torrent search engines and other sites that assist in the illegal distribution of copyrighted films, music and other content.
The boycott has already cost GoDaddy thousands of customers. One company pulled more than 1,000 domains from GoDaddy already. Still, GoDaddy controls 45 million domain names, four times more than its closest competitor, so it is unlikely elephant hunter and company founder Bob Parsons will be taking a pay cut.
The boycott threat did make GoDaddy swap sides, however.
SOPA is not a done deal. Congress is expected to take up the measure in January. It’s a political hot potato if there ever was one.
One one side of the issue you have what has been called “old media” — the politically powerful but financially faltering movie and music industry.
Opponents of SOPA read like a who’s who of the Internet. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote a letter to key members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, saying SOPA poses “a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation’s cybersecurity.”
Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Dec. 15 that SOPA would “censor search results” and put the U.S. on par with “the most oppressive nations in the world.”
Yahoo quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the organization’s enthusiastic support for SOPA. Google is considering it.
So far, at least $91 million has been spent on lobbying efforts to assure SOPA’s passage, according to the non-partisan Center For Responsive Politics.
Meanwhile, viral songstress Leah Kauffman has let her feelings be known with the release of “Firewall (Don’t Let Our Government Ruin The Internets).”
What happens next? No telling, but when it comes to stopping copyright violators, perhaps that pirate ship has already sailed.
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28 comments Add your comment
B&C Headlines
December 29th, 2011
4:01 pm
[...] dinged in Hollywood’s anti-piracy [...]
Tom in GA
December 29th, 2011
4:25 pm
A lot of powerful companies, individuals, politicians, et.al. have learned that catch phrases will convince individuals to support things that aren’t in that individual’s best interest. We do things “for the children” even though the intended good might carry consequences of creating selfish, self-centered brats. We support “equality for all” even though the intended good destroys institutions and social structures which themselves do a whole lot more good.
A rather unholy alliance formed by media and cultural entities working with politicians have created a bill that supposedly “prevents theft and supports artists”. In reality, as many have noted, what it does is give tremendous legal power to entertainment companies that will reverberate throughout the marketplace and an average American’s daily life. The artists won’t be any better off and piracy will take new forms that only show greater contempt for the rule of law (and regardless, entertainment corporations like Sony, Disney, and others will continue to make tremendous profits).
Bad Metaphor
December 29th, 2011
4:26 pm
For those claiming anti-SOPA is pro-piracy, let me proffer a metaphor for what SOPA would do so maybe you can see why we’re against it.
let’s say someone robs your house. you then hear a rumor that they may have put your things that they stole into a safe deposit box in a suntrust. so you tell the government this and – without looking into it at all – they close every single suntrust and freeze all of their assets until suntrust can prove that your stolen goods *aren’t* in their safe deposit box.
obviously, theft and piracy are wrong. but that doesn’t make SOPA right. and that’s without delving into issues of false copyright claims or the silencing effect this legislation would have on the internet.
Steve
December 29th, 2011
4:41 pm
Mason, sorry but an actor who can get $25M for his/her services is worth $25M and I don’t begrudge that person accepting not a penny less for those services. I certainly don’t go around looking for an employer who will pay me less nor do I offer to discount my labor. Maybe you do.
In any event, stealing is stealing. If an artist or media company can command particular prices for their wares, then that’s what those wares are worth. If they cannot, either they drop the price or go out of business. It has nothing to do with your definition of “good enough” and getting enough people to pay to make up for the parasites stealing. Justifying stealing by saying “enough people” will pay so the artist or people who work at jobs producing, packaging, marketing, and managing that artist’s work is morally lazy.
Matt
December 29th, 2011
4:42 pm
Great article, and thank you AJC.com for spreading the message about the SOPA / PIPA its intent. The fact that internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and so on can actually block access to certain websites is almost ludicrous that it border-lines China’s access blocking.
Shaye
December 29th, 2011
5:35 pm
Anyone who doesn’t see that SOPA would be like building a secong Great Firewall is not paying attention. It has very little to do with pirating, the way teh legislations is worded, which is way too overly broad. Yeah, it sucks that people ’steal’ movies and music, but guess what–most of them probably wouldn’t pay for it anyway. And yeah, I’m a musician’s wife, so I know exactly how much musicians make from their record sales–next to nothing. Wake up, Hollywood and RIAA, it’s time to change a failing business model, not run around screaming like a bunch of little girls about the dirty, dirty thieves.
Darvocet spending
December 30th, 2011
1:02 am
I bet this bill is championed by conservatives–the same ones that will turn right around and talk about the importance of smaller government.
This really seems like the one of the last gasps of the old media. Movie revenues hit a 16 year low in 2011, and this year marked the first colossal failure of a Disney animated feature (Mars Needs Moms). Still, the old media doesn’t understand it is the dinosaur of tomorrow and will play a decreasing role in entertainment–along with reduced profits.
The scariest part is how ignorant Washington is about technology. Listen to Congress members talk about the internet. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so terrifying. That’s how we ended up with the DMCA–it was essentially written by the old entertainment media and thrust upon completely clueless lawmakers (of both aisles), but piracy has arguably escalated several orders of magnitude since then.
Remember when the MPAA and RIAA sued thousands of people in court for sharing music and movies? They realized it was costing them too much and have given up that approach in the last year or two. Likewise, SOPA is a terrible law that will do little to stop piracy, but essentially sets up corporate governance of the internet. Horrible, horrible idea.
BTW: if it wasn’t obvious that GoDaddy’s CEO was a douchebag from the commercials, it should be now.
Aqua Bubble
January 25th, 2012
11:02 pm
Hello, I love to find out more about this subject. Thank you for writing this.