Paul Smalera

Think right now about your home bookshelf. If yours looks like mine, it contains odds and ends, comic books you’ve saved for years, books mailed to you or bought on a street corner, your own collection of dog-eared titles, some old yearbooks. Now think about the privacy of your own home and the few legal ways in which that privacy can be violated: an emergency response, a crime, a public health crisis. Imagine if once a year you had to open your door to a copyright agent who could scan your library for content that you have not paid for, add up your violations, and send you a bill. Imagine if the agent came by once a week, or even once a day. Imagine that the agent found a picture of the nerdy kid from high school in your yearbook and explained that that kid copyrighted his likeness, so you’ll have to either pay up or destroy his high school photo.

This is the world that content companies want to create. Legislation they have proposed in the U.S. and around the world — SOPA, PIPA and ACTA — would open the Internet’s house to any agent.

Artists and big companies often warn us of the opposite of this problem — the idea that the Internet is a lawless space where content is pirated, stolen and shared recklessly, costing them billions of dollars in lost revenue and shrinking the incentives for artists to produce new works. After all, if they can’t be paid fairly for them, why bother?

But not being able to monetize media doesn’t mean you have to obsessively limit it. As the content companies see it, the bookshelf described above is the data stream heading into your house, and they, specifically those who create music and video, are demanding that governments consent, more or less, to let them tap the wires. SOPA and PIPA are currently on hold, but ACTA, whose provisions are almost as enveloping, is taking root all over Europe, though not without protests.

Amazingly, governments around the world, including the Obama administration, resisted making ACTA’s text public. American politicians said the provisions the U.S. was agreeing to enforce were “national security secrets.” Ironic, then, that the Internet should be open for inspection, but the inspectors’ marching orders shouldn’t.

When the text was eventually leaked, reportedly by EU officials, the measures didn’t quite allow copyright agents to search your house, but they weren’t too far off. One particularly draconian provision allows for border searches of iPods and other electronic devices — not for terrorism prevention, but for theft of intellectual property. I suppose this means that if you were planning on partying to Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album or Girl Talk’s All Day on your Cancun vacation, you had better burn it to a CD and stuff it into your underwear, lest the Border Patrol decide to take your Genius Mode for a whirl.

According to a recent study on SOPA, 52 percent of Americans support penalties of some sort for illegal downloading, but only 36 percent support the provisions for enforcing copyright protection that SOPA allowed. If there were clearer proof that Americans, and indeed people around the world, could be convinced to pay for content if the system were fair, friendly and flexible, Apple or Amazon would have already created it. Which, actually, maybe they have.

Among the serious issues lawmakers and content providers should tackle is fair use. The copyright enforcement systems proposed in recent laws nearly make it a crime even to listen to music that hasn’t been paid for. One thing the music business must do is stop squeezing startups that become successful. As Spotify has accelerated its growth, its royalty payments to the recording industry have, by one measure, eclipsed those of terrestrial radio. If Neil Young is right and piracy is the new radio, music labels should be hoisting the Jolly Roger, not tearing it down.

If the music industry would focus its attention on creating a clearinghouse that allowed for affordable music sharing and discovery through digital tools, it could still save itself. The book publishing industry, which had to wait for the invention of e-ink to get serious about digital, is arguably further along. It at least has begun supporting limited “lending” of books and has even enabled social bookmarking and other similar features. At the same time, the book industry has won some battles against Amazon, regaining its right to set the price of its content in Amazon’s Kindle store.

During a recent panel discussion on copyright, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian talked about the need for the content industry’s scarcity-based pricing model to be superseded by something more attuned to our digital times — something that makes sense not just for businesses but for artists and consumers too. The problem is, the models the industry has proposed far too often resemble the type of intrusive interrogations by state agents one would expect to find in a totalitarian state rather than an open society.

Content creators and artists openly worry about the power of the Internet to rob them of compensation — which, for many, is their incentive to keep creating. What they ought to worry about are the incentives their proposed laws are creating — incentives not only for artists but also for consumers and distribution networks — to abandon altogether their high-walled, authoritarian compensation and copyright enforcement models. Where one castle crumbles, a thousand wildflowers may bloom.

PHOTO: Protesters opposed to anti-piracy legislation gather to demonstrate against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being considered by Congress, at City Hall in San Francisco, January 18, 2012. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Online privacy doesn’t exist. It was lost years ago. And not only was it taken, we’ve all already gotten used to it. Loss of privacy is a fundamental tradeoff at the very core of social networking. Our privacy has been taken in service of the social tools we so crave and suddenly cannot live without. If not for the piracy of privacy, Facebook wouldn’t exist. Nor would Twitter. Nor even would Gmail, Foursquare, Groupon, Zynga, etc.

And yet people keep fretting about losing what’s already gone. This week, like most others of the past decade, has brought fresh new outrages for privacy advocates. Google, which a few weeks ago changed its privacy policy to allow the company to share your personal data across as many as 60 of its products, was again castigated this week for the changes. Except this time, the shouts came in the form of a lawsuit. The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the FTC to compel it to block Google’s changes, saying they violated a privacy agreement Google signed less than a year ago.

Elsewhere, social photography app Path was caught storing users’ entire iPhone address books on their servers and have issued a red-faced apology. (The lesser-known app Hipster committed the same sin and also offered a mea culpa.) And Facebook’s IPO has brought fresh concerns that Mark Zuckerberg will find creative new ways to leverage user data into ever more desirable revenue-generating products.

This is the way we’re private now. It’s ludicrous for anyone who loves the Internet to expect otherwise. How else are these services supposed to exist — let alone make any money? Theft or misuse of private user data is a crime, certainly. But no social web app — not one — can work without intense analytics performed on the huge data sets that users provide to them voluntarily (you did read the terms of service agreement…right?).

And the issue compounds when people connect one site to another. By linking their Twitter to their Facebook to their Google+ to their Foursquare to their Zynga to their Instagram to their iOS, users are consolidating their lives, and in the process making them more attractive to marketers. While Facebook, Twitter and other services have made attempts to warn users about hitting the “connect” button, many of us hit that button with reckless abandon, without a thought of who’s slavering on the other side.

The reason social media and digital information companies want that data is because of what we refuse to give them: money. No one wants to pay for the privilege of chatting with their friends or using a coupon, and to this day, no one has to: Go ahead, ring their doorbell or pick up the free coupon book from your front stoop. But if you want to chat using Facebook or Gmail, or you want to buy a groupon for an 80 percent-off Botox service, you will have to tell those companies who you are. And those companies will use that information to tailor their offerings to you, increasing your value as a user and a customer. They will slice their data sets into a million different pieces and show those pieces to people — advertisers — who will pay them money for the privilege of using their service. They’ll use it to get to you.

This is an update on an old media model. Magazines and newspapers for decades could only guess at the readership of their product and the demographic of their customers. But now social and new media demand to — and can — know exactly who you are before they agree to let you use their free services. Even email newsletter services like the increasingly hot Thrillist – which might innocuously start you on their service by asking only for your simple email address — deploy click trackers, pixel trackers and other online data-gathering techniques to start to put together a picture of you as a user, both individually and in aggregate. A deceased magazine like Spy could only dream of that kind of intel.

Without such strategies, social web companies like these couldn’t exist. Every user has a choice when it comes to privacy, sure. But the second people sign up for Gmail, Facebook, Mint or Gilt Group, they have reaffirmed their willingness to be a mouse that the cats will chase. And these cats need mice. Otherwise they will starve. So they do their best to hide their intentions. Indeed, as a longtime and well-known advocate for the transformative power of technology recently told me, true believers like Mark Zuckerberg actively stake out radical positions on privacy, then talk about them as if they were natural or normal. It’s not too much different from the political process, where the best way to effect a shift in society is to present it as if it were a fait accompli and then expend energy actually moving the levers of power toward the shift rather than wasting time arguing with people about the implications.

That’s what the last five years have been about. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, wanted a collection of all our Facebook actions called an Open Graph to be part of our lives. Now, lo and behold, it is.

Today, we straddle two extremes — the offline and the online. Each comes with its own expectations and realities of what privacy is. Offline, your thoughts and actions are your own. Online, sharing one thing leads to a spiral effect where you are soon sharing everything. Offline gives us privacy, that near-mystical quality of ownership that we covet. Online gives us the extreme power of social tools, allowing us to glide around the formerly linear data of our existence. Want your private Rolodex? Fine. Want your location-aware, instant-coupon, friend-tagging iPhone app? That’s fine too. But on the Internet, you don’t get to have both. There is no longer any middle ground. As in politics, the Internet has become a place for extremists.

Photo: People wear masks during the “Freiheit Statt Angst” (Freedom instead of Fear) protest calling for the protection of digital data privacy in Berlin, September 10, 2011. The masks were handed out by the organizers who asked participants of the rally to wear them for the media to symbolise what call the individual’s right to remain anonymous on the internet. REUTERS/Thomas Peter