The price we pay for a free Internet

Quick question for you: who won the Stanley Cup in 1984? If you want to Google it on your smart phone, go ahead, I'll wait....

That's right, it was the New York Islanders. If you don't think it's impressive that you were able to find that out in a matter of seconds, don't worry, you're not alone. It's commonplace now. Information is free. When's the last time you paid for your news? Your music? Your movies? Your adult entertainment?

If you can't remember, you're not alone in that either. There's no problem with that, right? I mean, it's 2012, it's the way the world works. Well, thanks to bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)  and Canada's Bill C-11 that may change.

I'd like to add that Bill C-11 is by far the most Draconian of the list. If it is passed, say goodbye to your ability to even access the Internet under even the accusation of copyright infringement.

Before you tear this paper up, I'd like to say that I do not support SOPA, C-11 or ACTA or anything to that effect, but when I look back to the early days of Napster, Kaaza and the other various file-sharing programs that kept popping up, I do have to ask myself, "who is the bad guy in all of this?" .

It seems easy to establish that on the outside. It's the Corporations. They're all greedy and are probably run by evil Batman villains. Yes, it is true there is undoubtedly a lot of backdoor lobbying from the entertainment industry. Yes, we should oppose them like the way we did, whether it's on Wall Street, or in the Internet Blackout. But, let's remember one thing – we were the ones who stole from them in the first place.

It was easy to justify. Sure, piracy was illegal, but so is jaywalking and I've never met anyone who went to jail for either. The entertainment companies were already rich. None of us were going to lose sleep over the fact that Chad Kroger from Nickelback couldn't add to his exotic car collection. If it was a crime, then it was just a victimless crime, at best.

And then, little by little, the victims showed up. It was partly the rich entertainment industry, but they could take the hit. It was the aspiring creators: the writer, the musician, the filmmaker, etc; they couldn't handle the pinch. Once music, films, news and information became free, no one wanted to pay for it. That's because the industry didn't want to take a chance on something new. That's why we we're seeing fourth, fifth and sixth sequels to film franchises to old film franchises like The Fast and the Furious or Mission Impossible. You have to dig and dig for music worth listening to because Katy Perry is all you find on the radio.

With piracy, however, came the advent of user submitted content. We began making blogs, youtube channels, myspace pages. This was when the industry realized they were screwed because it wasn't just the piracy. We were now entertaining, informing and educating each other. Many of us even make a good living at it. Perez Hilton, an independent gossip blogger, charges $55,000 per banner ad on his self-produced site.

The entertainment and media industry could have jumped right on board with Napster and other p2p (person to person sharing) services the day they were invented and embraced the new frontier. Instead, they sued them and created the biggest black market the World has ever know. I'm not saying that we should all stop downloading music, it's too late for that. The dam is already broken and there's no going back.

But, that's what the entertainment industry wants. To go back to when we used to just watch. And if we created, we just created for them and not ourselves.

Let me reiterate that I do not support SOPA,  ACTA, C-11 or anything related to it. If they are in fact approved or ratified, it will be by people who do not understand the Internet and they will soon find out that it is completely unenforceable. Imagine trying to police the entire Internet person by person, page by page, video by video. But if we learned anything from Megaupload being shutdown the day after the Internet blackout, it's that they don't really need them to. And if you steal $500 million from an entire industry, they tend to get mad and they don't play fair when they try to get it back.