Der Tag, an dem das Internet zurückschlug

The Guardian beschreibt anschaulich den Paradigmenwechsel, der sich auch darin äußert, wie sich Bürger über das Internet gegen Lobbyaktivitäten großer Konzerne bei SOPA/PIPA erfolgreich gewehrt haben:

In the past 30 years in the US, they have lobbied for 15 pieces of legislation aimed at tightening their grip on their content, as technology has moved ever faster to prise their fingers open.

In this seemingly never-ending battle, 18 January 2012 was a defining date, a day when the internet hit back. Mike Masnick, founder of TechDirt and one of Silicon Valley’s most well-connected bloggers, remembers running through the corridors of the Senate in Washington, laptop open, desperately trying to find a Wi-Fi signal.

Around him was chaos. Amid a cacophony of phones, political interns were struggling to keep up with the calls and emails from angry people across the US and the world claiming Hollywood-backed legislation was about to break the internet and end its open culture forever.

Zum ersten Mal seit der Verindustrialisierung der Kulturproduktion sind die gesetzfedertreibenden Konzerne im großen Stil an einer weiteren Maximierung exklusiver Rechte und ihrer Durchsetzung gescheitert. Das ist ein erster massiver Schnitt in einer Jahrzehnte andauernden Gesetzgebungsrichtung.

Eine gewonnene Schlacht macht aber noch keinen gewonnen Krieg. Und es ist ein Krieg: Ein Krieg zwischen Organisationsformen.

Vertreter der Unterhaltungskonzerne haben das wahrscheinlich noch nicht verstanden und gehen von einem Kampf zwischen Unternehmen aus:

„This wasn’t Google v Hollywood,“ says Stark, a visiting fellow at the Yale Information Society Project. „This was 15 million internet users v Hollywood. That’s what they don’t get. I think they think we can just get a few executives and put them in a room and call those people ‚the internet‘. Well, now they know that’s not going to work.“

Währenddessen entstehen, für alle sichtbar, die neuen Strukturen:

There was a new player in town at the Sundance film festival this year, one who had financed 17 of the movies on show. That player was you. Kickstarter, a three-year-old website that hosts crowdsourced fundraising for creative projects, had funded 17 films at Sundance, about 10% of the total, and had another 33 films at the South by Southwest festival in March. The company is now a significant player in independent film, allowing cinematic hopefuls to take their case right to the people. It’s just the beginning of a major change in the industry, says Kickstarter’s co-founder Yancey Strickler.
„I think we are at a point where we are asking whether you really need a film industry for a film to be made or a music industry to make music. People can now speak directly to their audiences,“ he said. „And the demands of an audience are very different to the demands of an industry. An industry wants to know about merchandising tie-ins with McDonalds – that’s not necessarily what the audience is looking for, or what the artist is concerned with.“
Strickler was at Sundance this year, where a number of Kickstarter-financed films were offered distribution deals. But many people were also rejecting deals they saw as disadvantageous.