SOPA and the day the web got serious

For a long time an inevitable showdown between those who champion the unbridled freedoms of internet culture and the multi-national corporations who oppose many of those freedoms has been shaping up in all corners of the web. Today, that showdown has manifested it in the form of a widespread blackout protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP bill, which are currently being thumbed through by congressmen and women in the United States.

The two parties now at loggerheads have diametrically-opposed interests: one champions the free distribution of content, the other defends complete commercial control over its content. If you want to get a sense of why those who advocate the relaxation (or abolition) of copyright law believe what they believe, I recommend watching Brett Gaylor’s 2009 open source film, RiP: A Remix Manifesto, which explores the legal pitfalls through which remix artist Girl Talk gleefully travels in order to come up with his latest hit. You can watch the whole film online for free; this clip immediately gets to the legal-creative paradox to which modern technology has given rise.

But the extreme disparity between the beliefs of those who support and those who oppose SOPA has led to fanatical and somewhat unhelpful rhetoric evolving on both sides. From the wacky convictions of Swedish file-sharers who believe that copying and pasting is a religious act, to the seemingly obtuse tweets of a Rupert Murdoch knowingly protecting his corporation’s market share and influence, neither end of the SOPA scale is particularly pretty.

However, I for one stand by those who sensibly oppose the bill—and here’s why. As explained in an indispensable summary of SOPA by Internet commentator and Harvard academic Jonathan Zittrain, the most odious aspects of the proposed legislation are its worryingly ambiguous language and its promise to grant extreme powers to lawmakers which—this is no exaggeration—threaten the civil liberty of web users. The precise composition of the bill in its current form criminalises several recent trends in creativity and threatens to eviscerate the democratic identity of the web. Indeed, the bill places such stringent obligations on service providers that a default to censorship is likely as is an unpleasant reconstitution of the Internet’s architecture, if the bill passes in its current form.

Lobbyists, companies and associations will not rest until some form of SOPA is passed into law. However, it seems obvious that a much more public and informed debate will have to occur before that happens. Today’s protest may be seen as a request for that discussion to start.