The Real SOPA Battle: Innovators vs. Goliath

Looking around the web today, you're going to see a few things that are a bit different. Wikipedia is going dark. WordPress is too. Google has its logo blocked out. Twitter is absolutely abuzz. It all relates to legislation known as SOPA in front of the US House of Representatives, and PIPA in front of the US Senate. If you'd like to understand what the legislation would actually mean for the Internet, you can see HBR's earlier coverage about the bill from before it was renamed. But the purpose of this article isn't to explain what SOPA and PIPA will do. Instead, it's about explaining what's brought them about: SOPA and PIPA are prime examples of big companies trying to do everything they can to stop new competitors from innovating. They're also examples of how lobbying in the United States has become one of the most effective ways of limiting this sort of competition.

The argument over this legislation has essentially been characterized in the press as having two sides. The first side, which is generally represented by big content, is that piracy (and any new technology that facilitates it) is an existential threat to any business based on intellectual property. That's actually a line that has been used a few times before — most famously by Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, when he testified in front of congress that the VCR was to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler was to women.