Science and technology

Babbage

Internet regulation

Black ops

Jan 17th 2012, 21:42 by G.F. | SEATTLE

ON JANUARY 18th a slew of prominent websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit and Mozilla, will show the world what they might look like if two bills under debate in America's Congress come into force. For twelve hours starting at 8am Eastern time (1pm GMT) the portals' pages will go black. Wikipedia will be dark for all of Wednesday Eastern time (starting at 5am GMT). Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, has already advised students in a tweet to do their homework early.

The laws in question are the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), being discussed in the House of Representatives, and the Senate's Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (a contrived moniker designed to yield the acronym PROTECT IP, or PIPA for short). Both are meant to curb unauthorised sharing and streaming of copyrighted content by requiring American hosting companies, advertising networks and payment processors to stop consorting with copyright infringers who distribute content abroad that can be reached from the United States. Search engines might also have to remove links to such sites.

Many critics, including some of the internet's founding fathers (and mothers) and major players like Google, have been scathing about the proposals. SOPA, in particular, has come in for a lot of flak. This newspaper has argued that tougher laws against online pirates are needed, but that SOPA could hit law-abiding businesses. At present websites such as Wikipedia or YouTube, which rely on user-generated content, must take down offending material if copyright holders file a complaint about it. But if the material is hosted on a site overseas, American law is powerless. So SOPA would let copyright holders complain to American sites that merely carry links to pirated material abroad, and would force them to comply quickly unless they can show the complaint is dubious.

Some argue that the bill could be interpreted as forcing American sites to scour their servers for links to potential violations of copyright before even receiving a complaint, which would be a big burden for smaller sites. SOPA would also require internet service providers to block or divert traffic to offending foreign sites, in a manner that could disrupt the security of the internet's addressing system. Companies that fail to comply face fines, or even a spell in prison for their executives.

Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, frets that although SOPA’s supporters say the bill targets "foreign rogue websites", its definitions are by no means limited to foreign sites, or indeed pirate sites. As such, he says, it threatens free speech in America, because the law is broad enough to allow shutting down an entire site over one offending link, posted not by the site's operator but by a user.

Several sponsors of the two bills, notably Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont who was active in drafting PIPA, have already admitted that the backlash from the public, businesses and pundits, including some from Barack Obama's administration, has prompted them to revise certain provisions. Both chambers are now considering an alternative bill, called the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN), which focuses more explicitly on non-American websites and includes additional free-speech protections along with judicial process and oversight.

The blackout was originally planned to coincide with congressional hearings on security issues stemming from SOPA and PIPA, though these have now been postponed since it became clear that SOPA had hit a wall in the House. Many of the protesting websites see their move as another salvo in the pitched battle against what they describe as grasping copyright holders, bent on combating infringement even if it means staunching the free flow of other, unrelated information. They hope that the blank screens will win more converts to their cause. Perhaps. But many people will just be annoyed.

Readers' comments

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Dillon Thomas

I personally do not agree with the SOPA act,but i do agree that pirated music should be banned it would cause less problems.

By:Dillon Thomas

ShinyPC

By having a blog where pirates can post links to illegal downloads you are facilitating criminal theft and your entire website will be shut down, your computer hardware confiscated, all source of funds cutoff and you face potential jail time with absolutely no due process. All it takes is 1 bad seed to turn you in, make their own copyright complaint without any evidence or oversight and it is done. Think I exaggerate, this is already happening.

zFCwvqcaJk

This is possibly the most important news story of the moment, yet it's obscurely put to the side on The Economist front page. It's also interesting that every news company (who is in support of the bill) has very negative things to say or little coverage of possibly the most defining moment of free speech in the 21st century.

Looks like we are already seeing the start of state censorship.

Very disappointed in The Economist for not providing more up-and-front coverage of such an important event.

Bromo+

I didn't notice the "annoy" part yesterday - I saw an enormous groundswell of support for the anti-SOPA and PIPA crowd - so much so that the GOP all but withdrew support for the bills rather rapidly.

Interesting that the Democrats didn't pull out as much or as publicly - I suspect that Hollywood donation money is keeping them out of the limelight. Such is the state of American politics.

guest-iasmeam

google and wikipedia and others have shown us the scope of their power nowadays. if you asked the average citizen - whose side are you on: politicians or these service providers... the answer is obvious!!!

Kanner

This is a ridiculously neutral sounding article. The law flat out will not decrease piracy, will concentrate enormous power into the hands of a few copyright conglomerates, and will have far reaching negative consequences for innovation and business.

It is essentially an attack on capitalism itself by a tiny, protected oligarchy, and The Economist has virtually nothing to say about it, other than that the black out will probably annoy people.

This reads like idiot network T.V journalism, light on facts and heavy on he said/she said reporting.

Sean Mac113 in reply to Kanner

I tend to agree that the groups pushing for this legislation are simply trying to protect themselves from the free market. While I don't think this article is as bad as you claim, I would like to see a series of in-depth stories on some of the underlying issues involved:

1)An examination of the degree of involvement of specific groups (ie the entertainment industry) in writing this legislation.

2)A serious look at the figures regarding piracy (or any issue), where they come from, what they're based on, and how the government checks them before using them to push legislation.

3)An in-depth review of current intellectual property issues and practices today and the economic impact those practices are having, specifically as it relates to innovation in digital content, medical science, pharmaceuticals and fair use.

It's nice to see more mainstream media picking up this story, but there is too much focus on the specifics of these two bills and too little discussion of the underlying problems. We need to stop worrying about piracy for a moment and consider what the future relationship between intellectual property, free speech and the economy should be.

Kanner in reply to Sean Mac113

I'm actually entirely unconcerned about whether SOPA's awfulness resulted from ignorance or malice. The bill as it stood would have immediately wrecked the business models of youtube, tumblr and reddit, and allowed the copyright cartels to force the effective shutdown of virtually any website they deemed to be in possession of copyrighted material - on the mere accusation, not in court or in front of some tribunal with a fair process.

These are not accidental oversights from badly drafted provisions - instead the whole bill was set up so that the ISPs and providers stood to be accused alongside the infringers if they failed to act.

It is not unfair to say that hollywood utterly despises the internet and will do anything it can to ruin it. Not merely because of a bit of piracy (again, vastly overstated to the point of being not just an accounting error but a huge lie), but because digital distribution ultimately threatens to empower content creators at the expense of publishers and distributors.

While I agree such a discussion as you propose is well overdue, it cannot really come in the middle of what has been turned into an all out war. Deal with Disney et al first, before they ruin everything, all for the sake of being able to buy yet another 20 year extension on their stupid mouse.

TonyF2

It is to raise awareness, and it raised mine and that of many others I am sure. The long arms of overpaid US lawyers with rich paranoid clients are too long and it is absurd to give them ever-increasing unrestrained licence to do whatever the heck they like, wherever they like.

Whether it is chasing and extraditing Sheffield University students for doing something perfectly legal in the UK, suing the Republic of Ireland for not passing the right laws on copyright, invading and occupying sovereign countries, rendition or assassination squads in Pakistan and Iran - it all boils down to the same thing, and it is not right. The Wild West needs to be kept under some kind of control.

Garaboncias in reply to TonyF2

" Whether it is chasing and extraditing Sheffield University students for doing something perfectly legal in the UK, suing the Republic of Ireland for not passing the right laws on copyright, invading and occupying sovereign countries, rendition or assassination squads in Pakistan and Iran - it all boils down to the same thing, and it is not right. The Wild West needs to be kept under some kind of control."

And whom did you have in mind, who would be doing that controlling?...

Tom Jefferson

Free speech is a critical right - and the dubious copyright claims by corporate interests hellbent on controlling the Internet should not be allowed in any way to interfere with it!

fAFPk5xm3S

G.F., why are you so negative about the planned blackouts? If the major problem is not the public caring about their cause but not even knowing anything about it, the payoff from having people click on a link and learn about it would outweigh the annoyance costs. Isn't this especially important given that technology and internet companies do not (perhaps naively) spend nearly as much money and resources on lobbying? Maybe you've mentioned in previous links, but Chris Dodd is now the Motion Picture Association of America's key person, lobbying people he was just working with throughout Congress.

rewt66

What is Google's market cap? $200 billion. What makes the company worth that? Well, they have some very smart programmers, a bunch of servers, a mountain of code that runs on those servers, a huge database of web pages... and a domain name.

How much is google.com worth? Billions and billions of dollars - an appreciable chunk of that $200 billion. And SOPA says that Google could lose that domain name without even a court order? Do you see how insane that is? Do you see why Google has a problem with SOPA?

Ramón Planes

The equivalent in Spain of SOPA and PIPA, the so-called Ley Sinde, was passed in 2011 by Parliament but protests by artists and internet surfers have brought to a standstill the regulation to implement it.

As a matter of fact, this is sort of the first country in Europe in number of downloads, closely followed by France and the Netherlands, so I don't think they will ever be able to put a curb on the free download of online resources...

Tom Hunter

Babbage, I'm one of the many who are annoyed. Actually, beyond annoyed, I'm very angry at the people in congress who are supporting these terrible bills.

I love what Wikipedia is doing to fight back.

I think you missed an important opportunity to support liberty and liberal economics against the powerful and rent seekers.

6MsFJDi7Dj

For those who really need to use the blacked-out webpages, the workaround is simple: Either hit the ESC key as soon as the page loads (just before it goes black), or disable the Javascript commands for that page. This is easy to do with Mozilla Firefox's NoScripts add-on, or by going to Options and disabling Javascript globally. But this can be inconvenient. On Google's Chrome, you can whitelist or blacklist websites individually, giving you unimpeded access to Wikipedia and the other blacked-out sites.

jouris in reply to 6MsFJDi7Dj

Alternatively, you can click on the button with the red X (next to the refresh button in the upper left) in Internet Explorer. In Firefox, there is an arrow at the end of the box with the URL which turns into an X while the page is loading. Click on it while you are still seeing the Wikipedia page you are interested in, and you don't get redirected. Just takes a bit of timing.

jakiranz

This is very detrimental to the very foundation of our Constitutional freedom of speech right as well as our federalism-democracy. Our culture is so indebted to this idea of "expression" in which it is derived mainly from sharing our newsfeed through facebook from sites like redditt, wikipedia, and youtube. It is basically imposing more sanctions, not only on offenders but the businesses like Youtube as well as the smaller businesses and/or artists that produce money from these websites (in which this bill may ultimately eliminate). It stands far from what the founders intended as to having little to no governmental regulations upon (digital) people, businesses, companies, etc.

Oscar55889

Now if they could only prevent my name from being googled. Really, anyone should be able to have their name opted out of any search engine queries. "The Right To Be Forgotten".

About Babbage

In this blog, our correspondents report on the intersections between science, technology, culture and policy. The blog takes its name from Charles Babbage, a Victorian mathematician and engineer who designed a mechanical computer. Follow Babbage on Twitter »

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