Category Archives: Site News

If passed, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) would give the US government and copyright owners excessive power to police content online by blocking access to non-US sites that may host copyright protected files. Sites in question could be removed from search engine results, businesses may be prevented from working with them, and Internet Service Providers could be required to shut off access to entire sites. Moreover, if passed, the legislature would make streaming copyright protected content a criminal offense.

Content owners’ rights should be protected, but the language in both of these bills is vague, broad, and overreaching. In short, they threaten the existence of vibrant online communities and will stifle the creation of new content. I wanted to take a minute to express how SOPA and PIPA can directly affect our Indaba Music community.

Since launching in 2007, our community has grown to over 600,000 musicians from over 200 countries. We have worked closely with the recorded music industry to crowd-source official remixes for artists including Mariah Carey, T-Pain, and Snoop Dogg. Indaba members have been featured on releases by every major record label and appeared on records by Linkin Park, Peter Gabriel, Metric, and Yo-Yo Ma. Hundreds of thousands of online recording projects have taken place on Indaba, with musicians exchanging original audio files from around the globe to create new compositions. The activity and content the Indaba Music community creates benefits many different people – fans, major record labels, major music publishers, consumer brands, film studios, and most importantly, musicians. This is all possible because we operate in an open internet and have an open community where musicians can contribute their content to our site.

If the SOPA and PIPA bills become law, our community and the valuable content we create together will be at risk of being shut down if a single user links to copyright protected material. Currently, if infringing content or links were identified, we would have an opportunity under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to remove the offending content without interrupting our entire business, our partners’ contests and programs, and our members’ projects and interactions. SOPA and PIPA could bypass this process – if one comment posted to Indaba includes a link to a file sharing site, we could be held accountable. Moreover, while these bills focus on foreign sites, the precedent they set for controlling content on the web is extremely disconcerting.

I alluded to “China” in the title of this post (Caddyshack, get it?! I’d link to it if this post wasn’t about copyright infringement)… SOPA and PIPA are definitely not the same as the Chinese government’s censorship of the web, but the practical implications of how online communities could be censored and forced to operate feels just as creepy. These communities include YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Etsy, Facebook, and every other site with an international presence that hosts user generated content. There’s over 40 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute… While this may include infringing content, there is a wealth of important user-made videos (educational videos, short films, news, independent artist content, kittens… KITTENS PLAYING PIANOS!) that should not be subject to the censorship afforded to content owners by SOPA and PIPA.

An open internet, independent content creation, and efficient content distribution are critical contributors to what makes the web such an incredible place. There is more music being created and recorded than at any point in history, and a significant driver of this creative output is that the web provides an outlet to distribute our content quickly and inexpensively all around the world. We musicians benefit from our content being exposed through many sites on the internet – the more these sites are shut down, the less our craft can be exposed.

Today many members of the Indaba team attended the NY Tech Meetup SOPA/PIPA emergency gathering outside the offices of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, alongside over 1,000 other NYC technologists, investors, and entrepreneurs. It was a powerful demonstration of non-partisan resistance to the legislation. Speakers ranged from venture capitalists from Union Square Ventures and Foundry, expressing that these bills will hurt investment in New York, to entrepreneurs concerned about the livelihood of their businesses, employees, and user communities. Today also marks a 24-hour internet blackout where websites like Google (and Indaba) have blacked out their logos (or entire sites) for 24 hours to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA. Three co-sponsors of the bills have already renounced their support today.

Here’s a few things you can do to contribute to the positive momentum:

1. Tweet “Stop SOPA and PIPA #dontbreaktheinternet”
2. Share this blog post on Facebook with the Share functionality below
3. If you are a US citizen, write to your representative

Thanks very much,

Dan, and the entire Indaba Music Team