#J18

Did you notice something was missing on the 18th?

Like Google’s banner?

Or ALL of Wikipedia?

Or maybe Craigslist?

Just in case you were away from the Internet all day, (where were you? outside?) or if you were just too lazy to click one of their “about the blackout” links, I’m going to tell you what they were up to. Wikipedia was joined by over 7,000 websites in a 24-hour blackout to protest two bills currently up for debate in Congress named SOPA and PIPA.

 

The blogosphere has been set ablaze trying to decide what the most offensive thing about these bills is: The potential for abuse? Their impact on 1st amendment rights? Making us colleagues with China and Iran? The proposed damage to the Internet itself? Or just the general shortsightedness of this bill. What I’m going to do in this post is explain all of the issues people are taking with these bills and then let you decide what offends you the most.

Let me preface this analysis by saying that I am not a doctor, lawyer, or a politician. This is a breakdown of the issues with SOPA, as I understand them. I came to these conclusions after reading the Wikipedia pages about both SOPA and PIPA, Google’s invitation to join their anti-SOPA/PIPA petition, and numerous other articles and blogs on the topic. If you want to do your own research, here are the links to the Wiki on SOPA and the Wiki on PIPA. I will also link to the actual bills at the end of this column.

Bill construction

The way I understand it, this bill seeks to give corporations the ability to skip due process and obtain court orders to effectively shut down websites they find to facilitate piracy or copyright infringement. The mission statement of this bill is to try to control the foreign websites that are streaming movies/games/music for download.  Because of the way this bill is written, enacting it into law would destroy the Internet as we currently know it. This law would put the onus on the website to police itself, making sure there is no copyright protected material appearing anywhere, or risk legal action. 

The first step a corporation could take against an accused website (again, without due process) is to obtain a court order that would force American advertisers to cut off their accounts with a website, and keep new advertisers from working with said website. If that doesn’t work, the next court order would force search engines, including Google, to remove a website from it’s results. Another court order would physically remove the host site from the DNS servers, (we’ll get to the horrific side effects of this action later) if they refuse to take down the offending page. Finally, anyone with 10 counts against their name is a six month span would face up to five years in jail. 

Potential for abuse

If this power was truly limited to taking down websites used to host illegal downloads I’d be all for it. I don’t believe that art and entertainment should be free. Artists, and even corporations, have a right to earn money from the fruits of their labor. Piracy is a real problem that costs real dollars and real jobs; but the real problem I have with this legislation is that it also expands copyright protection. The fact that any website that facilitates copyright infringement is under the jurisdiction of this bill means we could potentially say goodbye to Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr, (or any other blog hosting site) and Twitter. The manpower necessary to check everything anyone posts on one of those websites for piracy or copyright infringement is unfathomable. To prove my point, let’s just look at Twitter. As of June 2011, the world was sending 200 million tweets a day. Twitter describes that ridiculous number as “the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Reading this much text would take more than 31 years…” And remember, that information is over six months old! Twitter has only gotten more popular since then, and if you add in the 800 million people on Facebook, it becomes clear that there are simply not enough moderators in the world to make sure everything on social media is copyright infringement free. But our losses wouldn’t stop at the blogging community; any website with a comment section, (a.k.a. ALL of the websites) would be in danger. 

Some chicken little types are have been screaming that this bill will land thousands of America’s daughters in prison. The scary hypothesis states that according to the letter of the law, if eight year old little Susie from down the block was to record ten videos of herself singing her favorite Taylor Swift songs and upload them to Youtube, she’d be off to the big house. I don’t believe the justice system would ever fail that spectacularly, but anything is possible…. 

Impact on 1st amendment rights

Thanks to the enormity of the Internet, you can already find people debating the constitutionality of a law that has not even cleared the House floor. Most of the anger comes from our innate desire to protect the first amendment. The fact that this law would allow corporations, or the government, to leap frog due process and get straight to the ban hammer is truly terrifying. I’m trying to avoid hyperbole because I want this post to be taken seriously, but the first thing that came to my mind when I read about this bill was George Orwell’s 1984. It’s not a perfect metaphor, as obviously this bill doesn’t give anyone the power to delete a person from existence; however it certainly has the potential to kill their thoughts and silence their online voice. For the average person, the Internet is their best (and likely only) platform to be heard by the masses. 

Seriously… what would we do without Tumblr? Source.

Our new colleagues
 

Wikipedia has defined five levels of Internet censorship: none, under surveillance, selective censorship, substantial censorship, and finally pervasive censorship. Currently the USA is proud to be in the NONE category, but if this bill were to become law we would immediately jump into at least the selective censorship group. That downgrade would make us neighbors with the likes of India, Libya, and Russia, among others. While the separation between these levels is subjective at best, we would absolutely meet one of the requirements to join the notorious ranks of countries with pervasive censorship: “Such nations often censor political, social, and other content and may retaliate against citizens who violate the censorship with imprisonment or other sanctions.” If you were wondering who we would be joining in the modern day legion of doom, here are the countries Wikipedia currently lists as having pervasive censorship: Bahrain, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Kuwait, Myanmar, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen. It is unfathomable to me that we are even talking about this as a possibility, six months ago we were trying to decide if the Great Firewall of China was a violation of human rights!!! 

Damage to the Internet

This part is at a technical level that I’m not confident I fully understand, however I don’t want to skip over this information because it may be the biggest issue to people who know what it means. To avoid passing on bad information from me, you should really read this part of the Wiki yourself, but a part of the bill would affect the integrity of the DNS system. At the simplest level (meaning as far as I can understand it) this bill would force the alteration of the infrastructure of the Internet. Think about the Internet as a sprawling metropolis, whenever you mess with the infrastructure of a city, bad things happen. Like if you close a road, people have to find a detour. The biggest fear I’ve heard from Internet architects is that if you start messing with the DNS it will be easier for people to accidentally find themselves in Virusville. Your computer won’t know if it’s following a government sanctioned detour, or a shady hacker’s shortcut. But seriously, read this part yourself!

General shortsightedness

Like I said earlier, I don’t blame the media companies for wanting something to get done about this. Their anti-piracy commercials aren’t working, they’re punch lines. Honestly I think they messed up by calling it piracy, pirates are cool, and you should never make your enemies sound cool. But trying to pass this bill is just action for action’s sake. Even if you throw out the moral issues and assume that this unprecedented power is used only for it’s stated purpose, this bill still has no chance to accomplish it’s mission. It is destined to fail for three reasons: scope, speed, and (ironically) success.

This bill asks for $47 million (gotta love fiscally responsible deficit spending) to fund a task force comprised of 22 special agents and 26 members of a support staff. So Congress expects 48 people to police the Internet, good luck. Even if these agents find the most nefarious site on the web and blow it to hell with the (choose your own joke here, your options are: Master Control Program, Death Star, or the One Ring… enjoy) I’m afraid this is a Hydra scenario; cut off one head and two will rise to take it’s place. It takes about ten minutes to register a domain name, less than an hour total to set up a bit torrent site. This is simply a numbers game that the government has no chance to win. 

As with all conflicts throughout history, this comes down to a struggle for power. The people that have it don’t want to lose it, and the people without it are trying to take some.  The media has always fought innovation, from the player piano to the cassette tape, and VHS to burnable cds/dvds/blu-rays. Media giants have fought new technology for the same reason that the oil industry fights with renewable energy companies, fear of lost profit margins. 

The American people have proven that we aren’t unreasonable; you just have to be willing to innovate. We won’t wait a week for Fox to stream a new episode of New Girl because we know that Hulu makes money. On the other hand, I have never illegally downloaded a song because the iTunes store is a reasonable alternative. We get so furious as a people by these companies claiming lost profit because the aforementioned iTunes store posted a $1.4 billion QUARTER!!!!! When the nation is sporting an 8.5% unemployment rate, you don’t get to complain about anything with a billion in it. The success of iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, and Video On Demand from the networks proves that you can make money in the digital age.

One of the best things about this country is that once we achieve new heights, we fight like hell to stay there.  A reluctance to innovate is not an acceptable reason to take our civil liberties, and until they give us a reasonable alternative piracy will thrive. The Internet proved its own worth on #J18. Google made it’s voice heard by adding 7 million names to it’s petition against SOPA/PIPA, and Congress listened. The next day, 13 senators who were originally co-sponsors for PIPA decided to oppose it. The Whitehouse has promised to protect our rights, as well as the structural integrity of the Internet. That being said, this problem is not going to just disappear. These bills will be back, with different names and a slightly different construction. As long as there is money at stake the media companies will fight for it. So keep your eyes pealed and your ears clean, the internet may be a megaphone for each of us, but it has no voice of it’s own. We need to protect it, so that we can continue to use it to protect ourselves.

From the Library of Congress:

SOPA

PIPA