Stewart Baker, a lawyer and commentator on homeland security and technology who deserves a much wider audience, has a short piece in The Hollywood Reporter that offers a very intelligent take on the clash between Hollywood and the “new popular culture”:

From the start, studios saw the fight over SOPA as a struggle with a bunch of other companies — Google and Internet service providers among them — that were hoping to profit from the Internet travails of the entertainment industry.

That turned out to be wrong. In fact, the industry is fighting what amounts to a new popular culture. Unlike the old pop culture Hollywood dominated, this one is largely independent of the music, movie and broadcast industries. In fact, people who spend hours online instead of watching TV or going to movies will probably encounter the entertainment industry only when YouTube videos of their kids dancing to Prince or spoofing Star Wars are pulled down by Hollywood’s bots, or when the RIAA threatens to sue them for their college savings, or when digital rights software makes it hard to move their stuff to a new tablet or phone.

To the entertainment industry, these episodes might seem like collateral damage in the fight to stop piracy. To the new pop culture, though, collateral damage and misuse of enforcement tools are everywhere, and they threaten everyone. The content industry has made itself into the villain. Increasingly, it looks like an occupying power, obeyed at gunpoint, despised for its ham-handed excesses and resisted from every dark corner. Unfortunately for Hollywood, as its customers migrate to the Internet, it is losing not just their money but their hearts and minds as well.

Baker also argues that Republicans have made an important political discovery:

For Republicans, opposition to new intellectual property enforcement is starting to look like a political winner. It pleases conservative bloggers, appeals to young swing voters, stokes the culture wars and drives a wedge between two Democratic constituencies, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

We’ve seen this movie before. Immigration reform, the DREAM Act, free-trade agreements and the USA Patriot Act all commanded impressive bipartisan support — for a while. Now, not so much. Bills on these topics still come to the floor, and they sometimes even pass, but only after endless partisan point-scoring and amendments driven by talk radio and mass e-mail. The same soon could be true of intellectual property enforcement.

Baker has been arguing that Republicans should side with advocates of free culture since at least 2004, when he published a superb review of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture in the Wall Street Journal. At the time, he noted that while Lessig was trying to appeal to Howard Dean-style liberals like himself, he’d find more natural allies on the political right as America’s intellectual property regime was coming to look more and more like a sprawling government program designed to benefit a narrow special interest. It seems that Baker has been vindicated.