My readers may have noticed that I've recently been posting a few links about the current battle around SOPA and PIPA - or how the old 1900s media organisations are trying to hamfistedly preserve their business models in a new technological age.

I'd like to briefly write about my personal thoughts on the matter, today.

It seems to me that the advent of the internet marks something of a change in the "laws of physics" in regards to how the world works. The internet functions through copying. The only way in which your computer at home is able to read a blog post, or see a picture, is that it was copied from a computer somewhere else in the world. You have an exact duplicate of that item on your machine.

Copyright laws were created hundreds of years ago and were applicable to a world in which the printing press was the only way to quickly distribute copies of text and images. In that era, there wasn't even a way of distributing music except via a new performance of a score, and movies hadn't yet been invented.

If you go back a few hundred years further, the very act of copying required so much time and effort that there was no point in most people learning to read. Books commissioned by the first king of England - king Athelstan - cost him and his court $150,000 each in today's money. They were printed on animal hide (vellum) rather than paper, and they were hand lettered and illustrated.

As we move forward into the 21st century, the technology is iterating faster and faster. Not only do we have Gutenberg's printing press to contend with, but also mp3s and CDs and the structure of the internet, itself. There's no way to take laws written in the 1600s and make them apply to the lay of the land as we know it, today.

If people who spend time and effort and money creating artistic and literary works, they will need to develop a new business model for getting a return on their investment. They're going to need to start from scratch. The RIAA and MPAA and other behemoths of the 1900s aren't showing us that they have the wit or the skill to adapt to the modern age. Their business model, just like Kodak's is doomed to failure - and like dinosaurs, they will become extinct. Filmmakers and musicians, however, will remain with us - and they will scramble to innovate.

SOPA and PIPA are examples of these old media companies trying to change the physics of the world they live in, instead of building business models around the new physics. They can't use standard digital containers like the mp3 format and the compact disc and the DVD - and expect to avoid the inevitable wholesale copying and file sharing of their product. It's like expecting gravity not to be in effect when you leap off the top of a building.

There probably are effective ways to create digital rights management systems. Computer programmers show us one way forward that ought to be explored. Individual hobbyist developers routinely create executable computer programs which each have unique kinds of copyright protections in them. I'm not sure how you'd apply this on a large scale. One problem is that your music or film might be constrained to one platform, and it might be difficult to make it available across a wide range of consumer electronics (although, given how Linux computers are becoming cheaper and smaller, these days, perhaps that's not a hurdle, after all). Another problem is scaling up; I don't see how it would be possible to standardise this kind of system - because once the same system is used for every piece of music and every film out there, it will immediately be circumvented by some diligent hobbyist technician who decides to burn the midnight oil for a few days.

Another way forward would be to cease making the sale of copies of music and films your main business model. Hollywood could work to embellish and improve the experience of theater-goers, so that people overwhelmingly want to see things on the silver screen rather than in their lonely bedroom or living room. Music and film creators could add some embellishments to the purchased product that could never be available to the product that is copied and shared online. Subscription websites for fans could be set up in a way that turns a profit for musicians or filmmakers. Musicians could become more skilled at drawing in revenue from live performances (apparently, this is already the main source of income for big-name acts).