This website hasn't "gone black" today, despite my opposition to both SOPA and PIPA, two proposed pieces of legislation that will "break the Internet." Honestly, I forgot to tell the IT department (um, that would be my boyfriend and me) to shut things down. Some radicals we make, huh. But since this blog is still up and running and accessible today, I best make the most of it and write a little rant…
Some of the biggest tech companies and websites "went black" today to protest SOPA and PIPA. The English language version of WIkipedia is offline. The Oatmeal, Mozilla, Boing Boing, Reddit, O'Reilly Media, MIT's admissions page, McSweeneys, Flickr, and Google are all either offline or featuring some sort of "oppose SOPA" message. There's a lot of self-congratulatory back-patting now too, particularly as it appears that several initial supporters of the bills are changing their minds.
But before we become too pleased with the power of the Interwebz to sway Congress, let's look at another branch of government and the decision that the Supreme Court handed down today. In a 6 to 2 ruling that public domain works can be given retroactive copyright protection. The ruling upholds Congress's decision to add another 20 years to copyright terms, meaning that foreign works like Peter and the Wolf can be removed from the public domain. As PaidContent's Jeff Roberts writes, the Supreme Court concluded its ruling "by stating that copyright terms are a political decision for Congress to make."
In other words, copyright law is always already political. ("The Law" tends to be so.) And as such, copyright law is always already in the hands of those with the loudest voices and deepest pockets. The protests today are meant to demonstrate that The Internet has a loud voice. And certainly the tech industry has deep pockets. In noting his opposition to SOPA on his own Facebook status update, Mark Zuckerberg says he and his company want politicians who are more "pro-Internet." Incidentally, Google and Facebook spent record amounts of money on lobbying efforts last year.
I suppose we can believe that those lobbying efforts are in the best interest of The Internet, but I think we'd be fools to do so. I trust lobbyists little, whether they're lobbyists for MGM or lobbyists for Microsoft (I chose those two for their alliterative value. I would add others but as Wikipedia's down today and I can't seem to think of a record label or Hollywood studio that starts with the letter G to pair with Google, so there ya go). When lobbyists for Hollywood and the record industry say they speak on behalf of content creators, I balk. As a content creator myself, I can assure you, they do not speak for me. So I feel the same way when technology industry lobbyists say they speak for The Internet. "Don't Be Evil" shouldn't be confused with "Don't Mess With Our Business Model."
We (geeks) tend to equate The Internet with The Public, and as such I would say our voices are (potentially) collectively powerful. ("The Public" tends to be so. Ideally.) It does help, sure, that the ubiquity of Internet access and the importance of Internet access (for work, for communication, and for looking up info on Wikipedia) makes us strong enough and angry enough to take a stand against this destructive legislation and to contact our elected representatives en masse. Hooray for "click here to send your Congressman a message" messages!
There are plenty of abhorrent elements of PIPA and SOPA that run counter to important legal tenets -- "due process" being one of them. But until we re-examine carefully some of our fundamental legal tenets about intellectual property, these sorts of whacky legislative efforts aren't going to go away. No matter what happens to these two bills, this fight isn't over. The Supreme Court's decision today makes that perfectly clear.
One of the great benefits of the Internet and the Web is the ease with which all of us now can be content creators and distribute our content worldwide. We humans have always been creators of original works and we've always been borrowers of others' ideas, even in the good old analog days. But when the distribution networks for most "media" were controlled by large corporations -- the publishing industry, the record labels, the film studios -- it was unlikely that anyone noticed that I'd carefully pulled together 20 of my favorite songs and made a mix-tape for my best friends or that I'd taken the scissors to a Rolling Stones magazine and used the words and images to make a 'zine or that I'd taken scenes from other famous movies and recreated them in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Oh wait. That wasn't me. That was some famous Hollywood director.
I think Clay Shirky is right when he says that the industries that are backing SOPA and PIPA have never wanted us to be creators. They prefer us as consumers. And let's remember: copyright law was not originally meant to protect content creators but rather to protect those who owned the printing presses. For many centuries now, the new content industries that sprung up were able to use these property protections to serve their needs.
The Internet has changed things: scarcity, remixability, reusability, citation, distribution. And while creation and sharing have been democratized by the Internet, shifting the power away from those who control the printing presses (in their analog and digital and metaphorical form), the laws surrounding IP clearly have not.
