SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was the biggest story last week due to the high profile campaign against it led by Google, Wikipedia and Facebook among others.
The act was prevented from being made into US law, although efforts to pass it could resume at a future date. Those in support were largely from the entertainment industry – companies such as Viacom and 20th Century Fox – who argued for new powers to disrupt copyright infringement on the internet.
The anti-SOPA campaign successfully managed to turn this into a debate over who should have the power to censor the internet. That they were able to define the debate in such favourable terms has led to some historicising about this being a watershed moment in the transition from ‘old’ to ‘new’ media.
Transitions in the world of making, distributing and consuming entertainment are less overtly, but perhaps more decisively determined by another kind of development that happened last week: IBM announced that their scientists have managed to make the fundamental unit of computer memory, the bit, using only twelve atoms. Practical application is still some way off, but could improve the standard of memory capacity by over a hundred times.
It seems that while the value of entertainment itself remains unchanging, the underlying economics of its availability are set for transformations perhaps beyond the horizons of even the most scrupulously modern legislation.
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