Dear Feds: Leave the Web Alone

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... or so the story goes. We are living in an age when corporate influence is at an all-time high. Corporations have achieved personhood, our bought and paid for Congress is so unwilling to offend their corporate paymasters that not even our smallest problems can be addressed let alone solved; and our biggest problems are considered such non-starters, that they're no longer even mentioned in passing.

However, somewhere in this quagmire, Americans (at least some of them) have seemingly rediscovered a certain word: No. In an unprecedented act of online protest, some of the most important online companies in America blacked out or modified content yesterday to show opposition to troubling legislation that is being fast-tracked through Congress, threatening the very nature of the World Wide Web.

The Protect IP Act and SOPA were ostensibly designed to police Internet-related piracy of copyrighted entertainment material. But both pieces of legislation are oddly vague and seemingly open to broad interpretation and potential misuse, while their effectiveness as supposedly intended, is questioned by many in the industry. This has caused many skeptics to wonder whether they are actually being attempted under the cover of anti-piracy in order to enhance the government's ability to control web content later on.

First let's distinguish between the two pieces of legislation. Protect IP, or PIPA, is an earlier Senate bill that is similar in its intent, while targeting only websites and search engines. The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, is the House's version which goes much further, including Internet Service Providers, possibly requiring them to monitor customers' traffic and block Web sites suspected of copyright infringement through the Domain Name System, a punishment being called the Internet death penalty.

Understand, anyone can register a domain name and build a website, but visitors require an ISP of some kind to act as a portal to that site and deliver them to the target, so to speak. This would be the first instance of allowing (even requiring) the access grantors to censor what you are able to see on the World Wide Web.

The bills would also place an incredible regulatory burden on some Internet businesses that would be charged with policing the activities of their users, as well as the ISP's that would block access to the blacklisted websites. Where the regulations get extremely dicey, is the seemingly perpetual ability to shut down user-directed forums, often used to disseminate dissident information. Places like Facebook and Youtube cannot possibly oversee every single piece of content that millions of users post through their sites. At any given time, there is some sort of copyrighted material being misused on any such forum.

Entertainment companies typically employ people to monitor for such content which can be identified pretty quickly. Then they request that it's taken down because of such infringement. Anyone who's ever used such a site has undoubtedly clicked on a link only to get such a message. These aren't really the target, though, at least for those in the entertainment industry that are backing the bill. The piracy concern is greatest for websites of companies that are based offshore in areas with little or no concern for U.S. copyright law and exist almost wholly to exploit that. In this instance, filing suit in U.S. court isn't really a viable option for recourse.

Is there a problem with copyright infringement because of the Internet? Sure, any improvement in peoples' ability to disseminate information improves their ability to infringe on copyright – but it also improves the ability to track it, and as such, it's often overstated. Prior to music file sharing services, people routinely made copies of audio cassettes and gave them to friends – same for VHS tapes. Prior to copying a written article (such as this one) into a blog, people surely Xeroxed them and passed them out at meetings.

The value lost is very hard to measure. First, it's impossible to know how many people watching an unauthorized TV clip on a Youtube-like site would have found enough value in it to watch, were the free option not available to them. It's also impossible to know how many as a result, then tune in to watch the show in its high-quality format on a television channel and boost ratings. Same with music; for every person who checks out a scratchy, low-quality video of some new hit posted to a forum without permission, how many click over to Itunes and pay for a high quality digital file to upload onto their Ipod afterward?

Do any of these factors make it less illegal, or mean we shouldn't be policing piracy? Of course not. But they do beg the question of how far we should go and at what point we are cutting off an arm to cure a broken finger. Sites like Facebook, Youtube and even Wikileaks have been an integral instrument of communication beneath the corporately-controlled level of mass media. They have been used to expose corruption and injustice, as a forum for protest, and even as a channel of last resort when oppressive foreign governments were cutting off ties to the outside world in order to brutally put down citizen protests behind closed doors.

In the intelligence world, talk centered around how efficiently some regimes were able to bottleneck access to that last portal of information known as the web, while others met their demise, at least in some part owed to their inability to do so. It would be foolish to think that American intelligence forces are not exploring the ability to increase their control over this least predictable means of mass communication, especially in these tumultuous times of increased civil unrest.

That is why, just like the NDAA, bills like SOPA cannot be allowed to simply pass through, riddled with unnecessary loopholes that have the potential to sit harmlessly on the shelf until it is decided that they must be deployed – under the shield of complete legal authorization. To not be mistrustful of a government that has so often misled its citizenry would be the epitome of ignorance, considering our history. If we can't rely on the web as a sanctuary for uncensored information that can be fearlessly disseminated among a society, we will be left to rely on a corporately-owned media and their Congress, who increasingly seem to be one in the same.

Contact your Congressman and tell them that you do not support SOPA, or go online to sign a petition. Yesterday's protests have already forced many of them to reconsider their positions, as the only thing that politicians seem to fear losing more than the money that keeps them in office, is the votes. While these two political elements are usually one in the same, it is only unified protest that remind them who ultimately decides whether they keep their jobs or not – us.

Dennis Maley is a featured columnist and editor for The Bradenton Times. His column appears every Thursday and Sunday on our site and in our free Weekly Recap and Sunday Edition (click here to subscribe). An archive of Dennis' columns is available here. He can be reached at dennis.maley@thebradentontimes.com. You can also follow Dennis on Facebook and Twitter by clicking the badges below.

Dennis Maley