The critique group blog post series will pause here today so that Boulder Writing Examiner can draw your attention to an issue of utmost importance -- of existential importance, even.
As you made your way around the internet today, you very likely stumbled upon a website that had "gone dark." Whether you visited Wikipedia to look up an author's bibliography, tried to upload photos to Flickr or Tumblr, or just wanted to browse a favorite blog, you may have found yourself face to face with a statement like this:
Today, until 8 PM EST, Making Light is dark as an expression of our opposition to SOPA and PIPA, bills making their way through Congress which, if passed, would create an American apparatus of censorship, liability, and prior restraint under which Making Light would be unable to continue to exist.
Today's website blackouts (list of participating websites here) are being staged in protest of two pieces of legislation poised to hit the floor of the US Senate and House of Representatives: SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT-IP Act). These bills are terrible ideas for freedom of speech, technological innovation, and global communication. It wouldn't be out of line to say that they would break the internet. Not only would those of us in the US be affected, but so, to some extent, would the rest of the world.
Untenable Operating Costs for Websites with User-Generated Content. Under SOPA and PIPA, website owners would have to exhaustively monitor all user-generated content -- forum posts, blog comments, reader-submitted book reviews, image uploads, possibly even real-time and in-game chat transmissions -- to ensure that no scent of a copyright violation can be detected. Otherwise, the entire site could be shut down.
This goes further than the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) did (and we already know how prone to abuse by big entertainment corporations that has been). Alexander B. Howard, a Washington correspondent for O'Reilly Media who was recently quoted in this article, explains that DMCA creates a mechanism for getting specific infringing content removed from a website. Complaints must specify the infringing content; the site gets a chance to respond. But, Howard says, filing a SOPA-compliant infringement complaint enables the US Department of Justice right away to block the site's ability to accept payments and shut ads, as well as block all public access to the website via DNS filtering (the so-called "internet death penalty".
Untenable Responsibility in Linking Content. To avoid being shut down in this way, it's not enough simply to spend those long hours combing through all user-generated content on your site. You'll have to employ that comb on any website you link to. To quote Cory Doctorow's explanation on BoingBoing.net (which is also participating in the strike), "In order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we'd have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site." Otherwise, under SOPA, you could be considered to support copyright infringement.
You're reading a blog post now. It's full of links. Checking every page hosted on every domain I'm linking to is well above my pay grade here at Examiner, let alone on my personal blog. You don't need me to tell you that this provision of SOPA would destroy blogging, online news reporting and pretty much the entirety of online information commerce.
Of course, Examiner probably wouldn't exist under SOPA to begin with.
Overboard Anti-Circumvention Provision. SOPA also targets any website that provides "information that could help users get around the bills' censorship mechanisms," say the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Yet another thing for hosts of user-generated content to look out for. But it's worse than that. SOPA's broad anti-circumvention provision would also apply to "organizations that are funded by the State Department to create circumvention software to help democratic activists get around authoritarian regimes' online censorship mechanisms." SOPA criminalizes attempts to aid citizen protest in other nations. SOPA brings a bit of China-style internet suppression home to the US.
The Chilling Effect of Vigilante Justice. So let's say you're worried about your website's ability to stay alive under PIPA and SOPA. Good news! You can receive a broad immunity status from those bills' punishing arms... in exchange for voluntarily blocking users or sites for whose alleged infringement the MPAA or the RIAA (for example) have "credible evidence." So, pretty much, the MPAA come to you and say, "We're going to have your site shut down -- and you know we can do it, we have the SOPA-compliant complaint all ready to go to the DOJ. But you can save your skin if you take this list of names, I mean IP addresses, that we happen to have right here, which you will help us out by blocking. Trust us. We have evidence that they're content pirates. That they also happen to be our competitors is beside the point..."
So that's a very broad overview of why SOPA/PIPA suck entire sedimentary layers right out of Left Hand Canyon.
If you're a writer, this is bad for you. Yes, SOPA is supposed to stop piracy, which, being as how you're part of this tribe of ours that makes its living by strong copyright law, you're probably all for. But where on the internet will you be able to showcase your writing? Where can you sell it? It's reasonable to believe that SOPA would take down Amazon.com, given all the user-generated content they host. At the very least, all reader reviews would have to come down -- can't take the chance that a review contains a copyright infringement or information that would help someone circumvent SOPA. Also the entire self-publishing arm of Amazon would have to go -- can't risk having someone upload an ebook for sale that consists entirely or in part of stolen material. They might have to stop carrying even big-name publishers' catalogs, on the off-chance that some book, somewhere, contains plagiarized content that slipped past the editors. It's happened before. It could happen again.
So you could say SOPA protects copyright much in the way burning down a library protects copyright. Nothing left to copy. Nowhere to copy it to.
I'd like to close by quoting Cory Doctorow again. I think this is probably the most powerful statement I've read to date in opposition to SOPA and PIPA, and I'd like to share it with you.
Big Content haven't just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the "fun" Internet: they've declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she's experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place — as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.
The contempt for human rights on display with SOPA and PIPA is more than foolish. Foolishness can be excused. It's more than greed. Greed is only to be expected. It is evil, and it must be fought.
How can you fight? Start here.
Thanks for reading.
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