"Student warning! Do your homework early!" tweets Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales. The crowdsourced encyclopedia, the fifth-busiest web destination in the world, will blacken its English-language sites from midnight to midnight Wednesday, protesting Congressional moves to crack down on Internet piracy through legislation opponents liken to China-style censorship.
Protest graphics are being Photoshopped while the movement is gathering support from across the ideological spectrum. Even the very conservative CATO Institute is raising objections, becoming a unlikely, strange-bedfellow ally of the hacker collective Anonymous. Who'd have thought?
Reddit, Tucows and hundreds of others (here's a list) are joining the movement including BoingBoing which points out its big prob: "Making one link would require checking millions, even tens of millions of pages, just to be sure that we weren't in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits."
No one's arguing in favor of piracy, but that the draconian twin bills before Congress are not the best way to fight it. The movement is taking on critical Twitter mass though hashtags #SOPAstrike, #StopSOPA and #BlackoutSOPA. @MCHammer, who has something to lose from piracy, is in. “These are the same men who went against YouTube, MP3's, sued kids who swapped files. Stop SOPA!!!” he tweets.
StopSOPA/PIPA badges are being swapped while programmers are tutoring site owners on shutdown techniques including instructions on how to knock pages offline for a day without disrupting Google page rankings.
WordPress blackout plugins and a CloudFlare blackout app are making the rounds as is a countdown clock. Facebook is planning a mystery event Wednesday in San Francisco, declining to elaborate on details. Sorry, invite only.
SOPA (The Stop Online Privacy Act), the house version of twin bills now in play, has been momentarily shelved while frantic rewrites are underway, led by California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, whose revised legislation has been given the warm and fuzzily-named title "The OPEN Act." This, after the White House said President Obama “will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” Still PIPA (Protect IP Act) is still alive and kicking in the Senate.
Proponents of PIPA and House version SOPA claim the bills are crucial in protecting jobs, movies, music other copyrighted content from resale by pirates and distribution via offshore servers such as Torrent nexus PirateBay. Estimates of lost profits vary in the $50 billion range; $2 billion in lost wages, claim supporters. And, it's been a tough year for Hollywood with movie attendance at a 16-year low. How much of it due to piracy? No one can say for sure.
'Censorship' advocates bankroll Feinstein, Boxer
California Democratic senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer continue to push for SOPA/PIPA, even as their Democratic president is blocking the bills. While Silicon Valley is the beating heart of the Internet, both senators have aligned themselves with SoCal, home of the major Big Entertainment conglomerates.
The Protect IP Act was co-sponsored by Feinstein whose Top 20 contributors are a who’s who of pro-SOPA showbiz: Sony ($17,200), Walt Disney Company ($16,600), News Corp ($15,625), Motion Picture Association of America ($14,700) and Time Warner ($14,425).
News Corp has been Senator Barbara Boxer’s fourth-largest donor over the past four years, and CEO Rupert Murdoch isn’t happy. "So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery," he tweeted Saturday before launching into a tirade against Google, accusing the search behemoth of siding with pirates, a claim Google heatedly denies.
Time Warner and Sony are also among Boxer’s top 20 contributors. In all, the TV/Movie/Music cartels kicked more than $898 thousand into Boxer’s campaign war chests between 2007 to 2012.
Pull plug first, ask questions later. Freedom of speech advocates see the moves as web censorship that would fundamentally reshape the Internet by blacklisting sites from the Domain Name System and put search engines at risk of prosecution for unknowingly linking to sites containing copyrighted material. As the Washington Post reports, plenty of law professors, including Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, believe the bills are a threat to freedom of speech.
The original version of the bill would have allowed copyright holders to block advertising and payment services for an accused Web site before a judicial hearing even took place. The new version of the House bill would require a hearing first, but, as [CATO Institute's] Julian Sanchez ['Killing the Internet to Save Hollywood'] notes, the bill “still makes it far too easy for U.S. corporations to effectively destroy foreign Internet sites based on a one-sided proceeding in U.S. courts.”
The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation worry that the bills could also cripple electronic tools designed to circumvent government blacklists, essential to human rights activists and political dissidents worldwide.
Any comic relief in this drop-dead serious battle? There's the bizarre report that SOPA author Rep. Lamar Smith stands accused of copyright infringement for artwork posted on his web site. Too ironic? Here's the story.
