January 18, 2012
SOPA
and PIPA, especially SOPA, these two acronyms were doing the rounds for quite
some time now. The recent point of attraction was Google and Obama centric
tweets by Rupert Murdoch where he spared no words in deriding the announcement
by Obama that he was not going to support the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ and
seeing hand of Internet giants like Google in lobbying for it. Murdoch also
sees an uncanny penchant in Obama for Silicon Valley tech marvels that,
according to him, are scheming to derail and mutilate the process to preserve
the ‘intellectual property rights’. "Big
bipartisan majorities both houses sold out by POTUS for search engines. How
about 2.2 m workers in entertainment industry? Piracy rules," he
tweeted. Ok Mr. Murdoch here very conveniently forgets the ways some of his own
outfits generated ‘intellectual properties’ – hacking, backing and then
sacking. Probably Mr. Murdoch is still ruing the closure of one of the most
profitable brands in his stable – News of the World – after getting entangled hopelessly
in the UK phone hacking scandal.
SOPA
and PIPA got the biggest boost today when the ‘really comprehensive and
affordable’ encyclopedia Wikipedia decided to black-out the website for 24
hours to protest the voice being raised for enactment of SOPA and PIPA. Wikipedia
has blacked-out its Wikipedia English site. The blacked-out site greeted the
visitors with the text:
"Imagine a world
without free knowledge... The US Congress is considering legislation that could
fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we
are blacking out Wikipedia."
According
to the latest report on site traffic by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia
English attracts 10,119,484 views per hour. Multiply it by 24 and it comes to
the average figure of 250 million views per day. Now that is a ‘more than
significant’ count to show solidarity with the protest call!
Add
to it the thousands of websites across the Internet joining the protest and it is
great enough to be heard loudly and it is being heard. It is not about
loopholes like Wikipedia English content pages still available this way or that
way as some analysts are writing about. The protest call had to deliver a
symbolic message that the common user is not going to be a mute spectator on
attempts to police and regulate the Internet as the proposed US legislation
says. And what could be better than it coming from a website like Wikipedia,
authored by thousands of free spirits across the globe.
It
echoes. Blogging site BoingBoing has gone dark for 24 hours. Google America is
showing a black box on its so familiar search home page. Services like Reddit,
Metafilter, WordPress, Craigslist, Firefox, Tucows, Modern Methods and many
more are either fully or partially blacked out or hosting messages in support
of the protest call. According to the Daily Mail, the Anonymous has promised
Sony some tough time for supporting SOPA in past.
And
the protest call has delivered the message rightly. Let’s wait for analytic
results on the social media traffic on the issue and the black-out that will
start filtering out by tomorrow. Analyses of the trend on Twitter traffic would
be interesting to watch as apart from giving pulse of the momentum, it will
also highlight the contrast to the Twitter CEO’s reasoning on keeping Twitter
out of the black-out call. He said Twitter being a global service will not join
an issue that pertains to single nation politics, in this case, the US.
US
Congress is to take up ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ and ‘Protect Intellectual
Property Act’ being promoted mainly by the film and music industry that alleges
loss of significant revenue due to online piracy of content. "Some technology business interests are
resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate
pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all
now seem to agree is very real and damaging," BBC quoted Chris Dodd,
senator and the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, as
saying. We need to see how the Senate proceeds on the issue when it takes the voting
on PIPA on January 24.
Certainly
the pro- and anti-debates are endless in this case like any other case where no
clear line of use and misuse can be drawn. Piracy has been a clear and present
danger even before the advent of the Internet. The way SOPA and PIPA have been
drafted, some of the provisions could really be detrimental for free flow of
information given the fact that once enacted, these may empower a private party
to approach advertisers and payment facilitators of a website to request they
sever ties. It is intended mainly to curb the sale of pirated content overseas
and empowers the US Department of Justice to seek court orders even against the
websites outside US jurisdiction.
One
of the many major loopholes of SOPA is it would make many circumnavigation
tools illegal. Wikipedia quotes John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center
for Internet and Society, saying "SOPA
would make many [DNS] circumvention tools illegal," which could put
"dissident communities" in autocratic countries "at much greater
risk than they already are. The single biggest funder of circumvention tools
has been and remains the U.S. government, precisely because of the role the
tools play in online activism. It would be highly counter-productive for the
U.S. government to both fund and outlaw the same set of tools.” John
Palfrey is also displeased on use of his research findings to support SOPA.
There
are arguments and counter-arguments and certainly, at the moment,
counter-arguments to SOPA seem to take an upper edge after the global
prominence of social media in helping and spreading the mass uprisings of 2011.
While
the anti-SOPA activists are homogenous in their appeal and are spread across the
globe, the pro-SOPA lobby is basically a policy ballooning exercise by some US
industry figures.
While
the anti-SOPA cause is more about protecting free flow of information on
possibly the only platform that cannot be totally censored or manipulated, the
pro-SOPA lobbying is more about protecting commercial interests.
Also
one of the major routes of online piracy is content sharing sites on the Internet,
that apart from sharing content that harms the financial interests of ‘SOPA
lobbyists’, also provides channels to the content sharing in many other
categories like the atrocities in the autocratic regimes.
Probably
the White House realizes it. A statement by White House staffers said, "While we believe that online piracy by
foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative
response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression,
increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global
Internet."
Piracy
is bad. Any attempt to regulate or manipulate the flow of information on the Internet
is sin.
Let’s
see how the game proceeds!
Robin
Morgan rightly says, “Knowledge is power.
Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may
be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.”
