Prepared Remarks to the White House.txt

My name is Steve Streza, and I work as an engineer for a software company
in San Francisco. Thanks for the opportunity to be on this call.

Copyright infringement is a real problem, and one the software industry
is very familiar with. The first forms of copyright infringement on the
internet were of software, not music or movies. We are well aware of the
problems there, and also of solutions that have been tried to protect
against it. We have seen what works, and more importantly what doesn't
work, and how people circumvent what we try. The consensus amongst myself
and many of my peers is that stopping copyright infringement is
impossible. But its effects can be mitigated.

Today we see the movie and TV industries making mistakes we made years
ago. Low quality, expensive, proprietary products with limited
availability. Major studios make content available through services like
Hulu and Netflix, but you can't use them if you're not in the US. It's
really hard to get these products legally. And every attempt to lock
these products down increases infringement and doesn't make it harder for
infringers.

This is not a problem of legislation, it's a problem of market economics.
Here's what I propose.

First, do not attempt to solve this problem with legislation. The
Internet is worldwide, and not subject to US laws. You won't be able to
stop the problem by gating off parts of the Internet. The DNS blocking
proposed in the SOPA legislation would not have fixed any of these
problems, and the Internet tends to work around such blocking measures.
We already have technology to circumvent DNS blocking, and new ones will
be created to work around other forms of content blocking. So don't
bother trying.

Second, companies suffering from copyright infringement will see success
reducing it by following the market. Infringement proves there is an
unserved market demand. Costs should come down, and quality should go up.
Files should not be locked down and made from proprietary formats. Make
content available digitally the same day it's available elsewhere. And
most importantly, make all of this available internationally. It makes
sense that, today, a significant source of intellectual property ripoffs
are coming from international sources, where these products are not
easily available. Cut off the incentives people have for consuming
infringing content, and you will cut down on infringement itself.

Third, reinforce safe harbor provisions of the DMCA for sites that host
user-generated content. Innovations like YouTube were able to flourish
because they were legally protected from prosecution if their users
uploaded something they didn't own. Make sure sites like this can continue
to operate legally without repercussions if they follow the law.