Websites going black to protest anti-piracy bills in Congress

From the Los Angeles Times, culled from OWS or Anonymous on facebook, one of those subversive groups I'm friends with:

Strike organizers say the online grass-roots campaign is intended to inform the public about the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, which aim to crack down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies, music and counterfeit goods.

Internet companies have broadened the debate, recasting it from one about piracy and digital copyright protection to one about Internet freedom. Calling the bills well intentioned but seriously flawed, they say SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate are threats to free speech that could stifle the Internet economy, drive up legal costs and lead to censorship or the shutdown of some websites.

The proposed legislation "creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world," said a statement on Boing Boing, a group blogging site.

"Boing Boing could never coexist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site," the company said.

Erik Martin, general manager at Reddit, a social news community that was scheduled to shut down for 12 hours Wednesday, said the bills were "an existential threat to our company and the industry we work in."

More here.

I'm not sure which one of these, Bill Moyers interviewing the authors of Winner Take All Politics, or the book I'm currently reading, Stayin' Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, probably both, made this point, but it is definitely pertinent to the SOPA/PIPA debate: money and lobbying are so extraordinarily pervasive within the US political process that gigantic corporations routinely and literally draft the bills on which legislatures vote. And most of these bills are just rubber stamped through to become the law of the land.

If that's the case, and I'm sure it is, the SOPA/PIPA bills are a prime example.

That is, they appear to be geared toward helping massive media companies recoup their "losses" to online pirates--I put that word in quotes because the assumption is that people who are happy to watch or listen to free media content would just as happily pay for it if there was no free option, which makes such "losses" highly theoretical. That's all good and fine, of course, but the way the laws are structured would place a massive burden on medium and small internet businesses, and even unimportant individuals such as myself, in short, anybody who links to any site that might somewhere have pirated material. It's not even linking to pirated material: it's linking to a site that has pirated material. That opens you up to massive lawsuits from corporate juggernauts.

I mean, what would I do if I linked to the wrong site and was suddenly hit with a million dollar lawsuit from Sony or GE? I don't know, but the risk here would make blogging quite literally dangerous. It would also render numerous successful websites unable to do business at all, thereby ending the internet as we understand it today.

It appears that the sound and fury already unleashed by SOPA/PIPA opponents online has made the dogs back off a bit, but I do support this blackout protest. One thing I've learned over the last decade or so is that corporate forces are never defeated: they just lay low until the shit storm dies down. Then they come back, stronger than before. It's looking like internet freedom needs to be a full court press. Forever.

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