Wikipedia and Google blacked out? Redditers in an uproar? Thousands of geeks abandoning their cubicles to take to the streets?
What's happening here?
Today's nationwide protest of Internet blacklist legislation is part of a brewing movement to keep control over the Internet out of the hands of corporations and governments. It's a struggle that puts Internet users before information gatekeepers. At stake is everyone's democratic right to information.
The movement owes its momentum to a recent sequence of events. In 2010 millions of Internet users became advocates in support of Net Neutrality protections. In 2011, the importance of digital freedom spilled out onto the streets as demonstrators with a mobile phones and a connection became a force in global protests.
Now, millions are rallying against two bills in Congress that allegedly protect intellectual property but go way too far, threatening to hold our free speech rights captive and stifle the creativity and innovation that's become a hallmark of the online community.
Over the weekend the White House succumbed to popular pressure and modified its position on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) saying it would not support any legislation that "reduces freedom of expression" or "undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."
Rupert's Twitter Attack
The White House's change of heart gave one media tycoon fits. News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who has been a staunch supporter of the most draconian curbs to Internet freedom, sent out rapid-fire series of tweets accusing President Obama of throwing in his lot with thieves, pirates and terrorists.
That Murdoch doesn't get the Internet shouldn't surprise anyone watching his recent efforts to control it. It's a campaign that goes well beyond Murdoch's MySpace miscalculation to include tens of millions of dollars spent on Washington lobbyists who are intent on passing laws to undermine the Internet's open architecture.
What's happening is that millions of people are joining to protest Murdoch and his ilk and protect our fundamental freedom to connect, link to and share information without censor or filter.
This open Internet movement is the natural outgrowth of a network that was conceived upon a principle of non-discrimination -- a network engineering ideal that had profound ramifications for democracy. According to one of its founders, Sir Tim Berners Lee, the Internet's original architecture was guided by a powerful concept: "that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere. In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up."
The First Amendment Goes Digital
Indeed, the open web evolved to become an indispensable organizing tool of social movements worldwide. It's no surprise then that the Internet would soon have a movement all its own.
Today's Web blackouts are its latest face, but the movement dates far back to the earlier days of the popular Internet -- about eight years ago -- when powerful phone and cable companies began to talk up ways they could control network traffic. Those words gave birth to Net Neutrality advocacy and engaged millions in efforts to stop industry efforts to filter or block content.
It also has antecedents in the backlash to web censorship by China and other repressive regimes. The blocking of online content from Beijing to Cairo only served to highlight the Internet's vital role in democracy movements and galvanize global efforts to pierce official firewalls and protect online activists.
And the movement has grown out of an open source community that believes decades of Luddite copyright legislation have stifled, not fostered, the online creativity and innovation that's essential to growth and prosperity.
In truth, the principles behind the open Internet movement go back much further, to the First Amendment, which was written to protect the sort of popular exchange of ideas that is the lifeblood of any democracy.
While America's founding fathers likely could not have imagined a technology that would put the power of the mass media into the hands of millions, they understood that, in the words of James Madison, a democracy must allow people to "arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."
The open Internet is the means to this power. The movement to protect it has found a voice in the millions of people who are taking action today. And the implications should be clear to any person, government or corporation that thinks it can harm our network without a fight.
Follow Timothy Karr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TimKarr
Sen. Ron Wyden: My Letter to the Internet
Christina Gagnier: While the Net Goes Dark for SOPA and PIPA, Register to Vote
Like it's FREE SPEECH for them to see my paintings, hear my music.
Nope. Sorry. This is nothing to do with free speech or inherent rights to distribute information.
Go write your own song and spend the money to get it recorded by eminently experienced professionals who have impeccable skills.
But.
Just because you've been published doesn't give you the right to throw me in jail for 5 years just because I posted a photo of my kid's first birthday party for my family on the other side of the country and your book happens to be on the table in the background either.
determined facial expression stating, "America will not be pushed around anymore!" God help us.
It is akin to holding a theater owner liable for a terrorist yelling 'fire!' Is it the theater owner's job to gag each person who comes in the door? Should a theater become a police state with guards at the ends of each aisle to quell potential infringement of others' rights?
By holding site owners responsible, one removes culpability from the infringer and places it elsewhere. That is back assward.
In theory, one could easily engineer "social attacks" on competitors or on one's social "enemies" by creating anonymous shill accounts on their forums or sites and posting "copyrighted" materials (images, swaths of text) then have them scrubbed from the internet. Dissent / enemies quashed.
This is chilling. We cannot remove due process and pretend to still have a free and open society.
That does not even begin to address the issue of "fair use." There are ABSOLUTELY "fair uses" of copyrighted works. Do SOPA/PIPA address fair use, or does it simply hand the government and corporations a loaded shotgun and a blindfold? Is it not beholden upon copyright holders to PROVE that a use of their work IS NOT fair? And is not the court system the place for such a proof?
Frankly, most of us will never live the 70-100 years it would take for works to enter the public domain. The current system is ridiculous, in my opinion. Aren't a number of Disney movies celebrating 75th anniversaries? And yet they have never entered the public domain. How can this be? We keep extending and extending the deadline, thus moving the goal posts and grand-fathering in older works. At this rate, it seems nothing will ever again fall into public domain... (Exaggeration, but not far off.)
Frankly, the only 'entities' that will still exist in 75-100 years will be corporations. Why are we effectively favoring corporations over people? I can understand an author wishing for copyright protection during his/her lifetime to protect their income from their creative works. But after death? What is there left to protect? The author has died. The estate? Sorry to say, but the children did not author the work. Sad but true fact. They did nothing to "earn" any royalties on the work, and their ancestor had their entire lifetime to gain fortune off their work and put it away to benefit their offspring.
Corporations should not be allowed to effectively "sequester" creative works, holding on to them for period far in excess of the term of an author's usual life expectancy, or even that of several future generations.
From now on, when someone passes on after a long and fruitful life, we can assume that their land and property is now in the public domain. Because after all, they had their entire lifetime to gain fortune off their land and put it away.
My Spam folder on my Gmail account has almost completely fixed my spam problem, all without touching my First Amendment rights.
Why even pretend at having a lawful constitution anymore?
These bills have nothing to do with canning SPAM. Don't spin confusion...
Frankly, I do not know which is worse: 1) the attempts to stop the flow of information; or 2) the 'news' disinformation to undermine the acquisition of knowledge that permits functional self-government in free and democratic societies.
I'd like to see more serious articles on the nature of that disinformation on Huffington Post.
They asked why I was giving: "Democracy collapses without a foundation of free speech and privacy. Power despises individual voices that challenge it and eliminates these voices when allowed to do so."