You’ve probably heard by now that many corners of the Internet (and at least one major thoroughfare, Google) went totally dark or self-censored part of their content on Jan. 18 in protest of two proposed laws, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), variations on the theme of stopping online piracy of American intellectual property. The protest seems to have worked: both bills have since foundered or been scuttled.
The trouble is in the details of the bills rather than their general (and widely accepted) aims. SOPA and PIPA, as originally crafted, would put into place a scheme that would block access to offending foreign websites via their domain names, a method which could still be circumvented by technically savvy users, and which would block entire sites rather than individual pages or files. Pay services, advertising services and search engines would be expected to stop doing business with accused sites (even before such sites were proven to have infringed copyrights). The lack of clarity about just who would be targeted and the potential stifling effect brought about by small companies’ need to police user-posted content are the heart of opponents’ worries.
The fight, like most every fight in American politics, quickly got reduced to two opposing cartoons. The bill’s proponents trotted out the idea that their legislation’s broadly written language was not broadly written, that, in effect, alarm over the abuses the bills might allow were so much hyperventilating—the argument also known to politicans as “trust us.”
In a particularly weird twist, the Motion Picture Association of America trotted out CEO Chris Dodd (as in the former Connecticut Senator) to call the kettle black: “[The website blackout] is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”
In the opposing camp, the potential abuse was spelled out: if a site features copyright-violating content, even if it was uploaded by a user, the entire site could be blocked, a worry they cast as a chiller of activity all over the Internet. You could be forgiven, if you perused the protest sites on Jan. 18, for thinking the targets of the legislation in question would definitely include U.S. ones. The language in the PIPA bill does, if in rather muddy fashion, attempt to define the sites that would be targeted as foreign ones with “no significant use other than engaging in or facilitating copyright infringement.” The protesters did not tend to focus on that language, avoiding the sometimes complicated issues of domain names versus IP addresses and other technical details.
The problem with all the oversimplification on parade is that it obscures two important issues. The first is that both sides actually agree on the substance of the issue of online piracy: it’s bad. It’s bad for artists, for entertainment companies, and for the U.S. economy. The two sides only differ in how they would approach resolving the problem. Nonetheless, SOPA/PIPA detractors get cast as irresponsible rogues by the bills’ supporters, a list that includes juggernauts of entertainment like the MPAA and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).
Those groups have repeatedly evidenced a tendency to hold on for dear life to old models of packaging and distributing what is often (and reductively) called “content.” Their dominance under the old models (like physical CDs and DVDs) drives a need to react with draconian measures to the new models the Internet just keeps sprouting. Hence SOPA and PIPA, which opponents say are akin to hunting birds with a bazooka. Addressing the rampant issue of online piracy is clearly necessary; doing so via political processes that involve more than just industry giants lobbying to protect horses in the age of autos ought to be necessary, too. (It’s worth noting that there is a competing bill that makes the attempt, one called OPEN—Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act—which has been posted online for public commentary but has already been rejected by SOPA/PIPA’s corporate supporters.)
The second problem is that the players in the fight are also being portrayed too simply. Chris Dodd is not entirely wrong in the next part of his statement, chock full of hyperbole and fearmongering though it may be: “It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests” (emphasis mine).
The stopping of SOPA and PIPA got portrayed, in lots of places, as a case of “the people have spoken.” That’s enough to make a fan of democracy get all weepy. But it’s wise to hold off on singing “We Are the World” just yet—in this case, the “people” relied for their protest on a large number of those who are only given personhood via bad law: corporations. It’s hardly a new issue in the age of competing boycotts, but the methodology of the protest brings it into focus yet more starkly.
The fight has also been cast at times as “Hollywood versus Silicon Valley.” There are many more players along for the battle, but that’s not entirely wrong. Google is, of course, a major corporation. Would the SOPA protest have been successful had it taken place without the muscle of corporate interests—if it had, for instance, taken place only on private blogs? It’s a terrifying question for those of us who’ve long opposed the rise of corporations as the ultimate wielders of political power. One cannot stand shoulder to shoulder in a picket line with Google; Citizens United Supreme Court decision or no, Google can’t be accused of having a shoulder.
In cases like the SOPA protest, mere people are siding with one group of corporations over another. Purity of concept might demand that anti-corporate crusaders reject such help no matter the consequences. Otherwise, the course is clear, and has, almost without comment, already been embarked upon: embrace such corporate partnerships. That must mean that large corporations can earn being called good, or at least occasionally good. Or, more likely, that the soulless driver of the free market’s grandest excesses—greed—now and then aligns with the best interests of people. Not a particularly comforting truth.
And indeed, in the days since the SOPA/PIPA protest, Google has become embroiled in a new controversy around its plan to unify privacy policies across its many sites, allowing for unified data collection about users. It’s not unreasonable to expect a new conglomeration of corporations and people to oppose that abuse, brought about by the very company that so recently seemed a champion of Internet freedom.
