Copyright and the RIAA

The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) doesn’t roll off the tongue now, but in 2002, it was every bit as frightening in its potential to transform digital technology as SOPA and PIPA were. The CBDTPA would have prohibited any kind of technology that could be used to read digital content without DRM. (I’ll repeat that, because it seems important and kind of amazing.) Nothing — no computer, no e-reader, no iPod, no TV or DVD player — could exist without DRM. Every machine would have a piracy detection system built-in.

This wouldn’t have just prohibited file-sharing and burning mix CDs. The only makers of culture, software, or scholarship who could afford a system of total DRM would be giant companies. It was using the specter of lawless pirates and starving artists to make a naked power grab in the sphere of intellectual property.

"There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who want to clamp down on the internet."

Aaron called the RIAA’s strategy of lawsuits and legislation "copyright terrorism," a pretty loaded term less than a year after Al-Qaeda’s September 11 attacks. The world was increasingly politically paranoid, with mandatory DRM of a piece with airport security theater and combatants detained without trial. When you read his blog posts from this time, it seems obvious that this experience fundamentally changed how he thought about these problems and his own role in helping to solve them. It wasn’t downloading MP3s on Napster or hanging out with Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig that made Aaron a critic of the copyright industry and a political activist; it was the conjunction of the CBDTPA and the War on Terror.

In 2003, when the CBDTPA was withdrawn after a "truce" between the music and computer industries, Aaron was only further jaded. What had been a fierce fight by him and his colleagues at Creative Commons, the EFF, the FSF, and elsewhere had turned into a piece of kabuki theater for Washington lobbyists, where one industry pretended to ignore DRM and the other industry pretended to ignore fair use. In an argument between two giants, neither could be trusted to be an honest broker. What’s more, both would claim the mantle of the people, and credit for any compromise.

Years later, when the precursors to what became SOPA started to circulate in Washington, and the content and computing industries began to throw glancing jabs at each other, Aaron had seen this script before. Sure enough, he would say, technology lobbyists were primarily interested in making the bill "better," less damaging to their companies’ bottom lines, rather than defending the web and its users. As he said in 2012 in his "How We Stopped SOPA" speech:

It will happen again. Sure, it will have yet another name, and maybe another excuse, and it will do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake: the enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politicians’ eyes hasn’t been put out. There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who want to clamp down on the internet. And to be honest, there aren’t a lot who have a vested interest in protecting it from all of that... We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom... If we forget that, if we let Hollywood rewrite the story so that it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us that we didn’t actually make a difference, and we start seeing it as someone else’s responsibility to do this work, and it’s our job to just go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers — well then, next time, they might just win. Let’s not let that happen.

Aaron had already been a political activist before SOPA. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, he joined the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, He was part of the PCCC’s original team in January 2009 and stayed until August 2010, helping develop its technology and working for Wall Street reform. That experience and the urgency of the SOPA fight helped him form his own political organization, Demand Progress. But in many ways, this was a continuation of those copyright fights from the early 2000s. Spinning the story of the SOPA fight after the fact, he would say that by 2010, he "didn’t care about copyright," that the issue had grown "too small" for him compared to health care or financial reform. But that’s a downright fib. Aaron was deeply interested and engaged in those larger issues, but never stopped caring about copyright. SOPA simply raised his visibility along with the stakes.