The information blackout, that is. Lots of websites joined in. As usual, I’m late to the party, and I’m not actually going dark, but I would like folks to think about the importance of what is being done–it isn’t, as has been claimed, a stunt or a misuse of power. It is meant as a sign of what will happen if SOPA and PIPA, in their current forms, will cause. The abuse of power is what would happen if the power was given to big corporations without the sort of normal checks and balances laws require.
Closing down a website voluntarily is hardly an abuse of power. Being able to close down a website because someone linked to someone who linked to a site that is black-listed because it violated vague rules? That’s abuse. As someone wise once said, “A vague disclaimer is no one’s friend.”
I actually kind of value the ideal hiding underneath SOPA/PIPA. I want my intellectual property protected. I want to be able to deal with people who steal from me, even if they live in other countries. I want them held accountable.
But SOPA and PIPA aren’t about me, not directly. They’re about people with millions of dollars, and legal teams, and the sorts of forces that I don’t have. If I were self-published, I’m not sure SOPA and PIPA would even grant me the authority to do what a big corporation can do under the laws as written.
I admit it, I’m no legal scholar. And I didn’t follow the brouhaha from the very start, thinking that it was mostly the normal sort of Internet over-reaction that happens on a regular basis. Yet as I tried due diligence to track down the Other Side of the Story, which I always like to have, I have yet to find anything to convince me that the alarm is, if anything, understated. SOPA and PIPA would be fine in a perfect world (one that ironically still has IP theft). But our world isn’t perfect. It has PEOPLE in it. And people do dumb things, and malicious things, misguided things, and occasionally the right ones for them, that aren’t necessarily right for anyone else.
The big question of course would be: will they stop piracy? I laugh at that one. Sure, if the Internet created intellectual property theft. But fake VHS tapes existed long before the Internet existed. Heck, you could probably buy pirated DVDs long before most people had really known what was up with that Web thing. The Victorians had to deal with hacking on the telegraph. Cervantes lamented back in his time about people pirating copies of Don Quixote and even writing bad sequels that make the fake Harry Potters produced in China look lucid. (I’d look up facts and make links, but Wikipedia is blacked out. Damn them and their abuse of knowledge power. Or something).
Want to know more: go to https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction