Senators Udall and Bennett,
I am writing to you today to urge you to oppose the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). I believe that this bill is ultimately sponsored by large media conglomerates who would rather legislate than innovate.
In the last 10 years, CD sales are down, DVD sales are down, Blockbuster has closed hundreds of stores. Media companies point to these signs and claim “DIGITAL PIRACY IS HURTING US! OW! OW! OW!”, and then they look to Congress to fix it through legislation.
I disagree wholly with the Media companies. A report released earlier this month shows that Netflix’s Streaming ‘On Demand’ service accounts for fully 20% of America’s internet traffic during peak hours. In comparison, ‘BitTorrent’ traffic (read: “illegal file sharing” – even though a significant portion of BitTorrent traffic is legal – many online games, for instance, use BitTorrent to distribute software patches to the game client, which is a perfectly legitimate use…) traffic comprises less than 8% of internet traffic.
I am the guy that the Media Companies are complaining about.
I don’t buy CDs anymore. I get my music from Amazon.com.
I don’t buy DVDs or go to Blockbuster anymore. I use Netflix. If I want to purchase a title, I’ll buy it digitally from Amazon.
The COICA seeks to give the Justice Department the ability to turn off (censor) domestically hosted websites *SUSPECTED* of hosting infringing materials. The Justice Department will not be required to *PROVE* in a court of law that the website hosted infringing materials, only that the site was suspected of same.
To my mind, this is a very dangerous and slippery slope that opens the door to the abuse of American’s 1st Amendment Rights.
While I understand that illegal file sharing is still illegal, I believe the correct response to the situation is to send a message back to the Media Companies that Congress is going to let the Free Market and Capitalism do their jobs, and that the Media Companies will have to figure out on their own, not how to stop illegal file sharing, but how to recognize what their customers want, and to *innovate* to provide that so that ‘file sharing’ becomes *pointless* – You need look no further than to the success of Netflix to see that it can sbsolutely be done WITHOUT censorship.
John Barton
Westminster, CO