The Silicon Valley Business Coalition op-ed

Thomas Jefferson once dreamed of having a library in every county in America: "Nothing would do more extensive good at small expense," wrote the author of the Declaration of Independence, than to make available "a few well-chosen books to be lent to the people."

Today, the advent of the Internet and the rapid growth in Americans' access to it allows us to surpass even Jefferson's vision of the democratic ideal. Instead of a library in every county, we have the possibility of a library in every home, stocked not just with a few well-chosen books but with a nearly limitless supply of content across every form of media imaginable.

What a shame it would be to squander such an opportunity. Yet that is exactly what we risk when government regulation and acrimonious litigation stifle and strangle the technological innovation that makes such far-reaching content delivery possible in the first place. Lawsuits like Viacom's action against YouTube, coupled with increasingly shrill calls from content owners to increase the regulatory burden on content deliverers represent a grave threat to both the new economy and people's newfound ease of access to information (no small problem now that we are officially living in the Information Age).

Perhaps none of our nation's founders understood the need for adequate intellectual property protection better than Jefferson – a prolific writer, thinker and inventor in his own right. But his understanding was shaped by a belief, reflected in the Constitution itself, that the point of such protection was to promote ideas and innovation with the aim of diffusing them throughout the public as widely as possible.

Similarly, those of us who strive to broaden everyday Americans' access to content have tremendous respect for the rights of the content owners. But when those rights are asserted not to promote innovation but to block it then we have strayed too far afield from the intent of the framers in granting those rights in the first place.

Our experiences with past government interventions into new technologies shows, that laws and amendments created to govern the new are bound to fail. Unclear and undefinable laws stifle innovation and discourage the development of new business methods. And in a constantly-changing business environment, laws and regulations that make their way through lengthy approval processes often lag behind the curve and govern situations that do not exist any more.

Instead of relying on the government to solve our problems for us, we urge content owners and content deliverers to work together do what we do best – innovate a solution. Specifically, we should be working to create an industry-wide filtering standard that allows easy recognition of protected content. Armed with such a tool, content owners and providers would find it much easier to navigate the presently murky waters of the Safe Harbor provisions provided for in current law.
Once protected content can be reliably identified, the invisible hand of the market will fashion several solutions. One approach would be to give the content owner a choice between removal of the infringing material from the content delivery site or a split of revenues earned from having that content on the page. For low-revenue sites, another possibility could be the grant of free advertisement space for the content owner.

In any event, a focus on finding a technological solution will keep us truer to Jefferson's spirit and bring us closer to achieving (and surpassing) his utopic vision than any lawsuit or bureaucratic rule ever could.

The Silicon Valley Business Coalition is a group of companies involved in development of internet-technology and internet based businesses. We experiment with new ways to create, distribute and market content on the internet. We respect reasonable copyright protection, but we seek to avoid overly strict regulations and copyright policies that threaten innovation and new ideas.