Dan Gillmor: Stop SOPA or the web really will go dark

Tuesday 17 January 2012 21.11 GMT

Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia will be switched off on 18 January in protest against Sopa and other legislative efforts to control and censor the internet.

The corporations lobbying for Sopa know exactly what they want: control of online information for profit. This is a crossroads

As thousands of websites, including the English version of Wikipedia, prepare to "go dark" Wednesday in protest against internet censorship, a new explanation is emerging for the would-be censors' acts: they simply don't understand how the internet works. The evidence suggests otherwise.

Search on the these terms – "don't understand" Sopa Congress – and you'll find a lots of blogposts and news stories making this point. Sopa, of course, stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, which may or may not be stalled at the moment.

Change "don't" to "doesn't' and "Congress" to "Rupert Murdoch" in that search and you'll find a bunch of new ones stemming from Murdoch's spate of Tweets over the weekend, in which he denounced Sopa opponents and took special aim at his longstanding object of loathing, Google. Two of the resulting "he doesn't understand" pieces came from people whose work I greatly respect: see this post at the Guardian by Jeff Jarvis, and this one by Mathew Ingram at the GigaOm technology blog.

I beg to differ. What we're seeing does not derive from any misunderstanding. Rather, I'm convinced, this concerted push to censor the internet, through measures that would fundamentally break it, stems from a very clear understanding of what's at stake. Indeed, legislation like Sopa, or its US Senate companion, the Protect IP Act (Pipa) – and a host of activities around the world – share a common goal. These "fixes" are designed to wrest control of these tools from the masses and recentralize what has promised to be the most open means of communication and collaboration ever invented.

Sopa is now, apparently, on hold in the Congress. But no one believes the copyright cartel and its allies will give up on their goals. And that is why a host of websites – including Wikipedia – will go dark on 18 January, to bring even more public notice to this trend.

Now, it's fair to say that some individual members of Congress have demonstrated, via their public statements, a lack of attention to the technical details of how the net works. I assure you, however, that the staff members who have taken dictation from Hollywood and its allies know precisely what their measures would achieve, if enacted. And I assure you that Rupert Murdoch and his top staff are fully cognizant of the realities they fear and loathe.

So, why do they make unsupportable statements?

Because they don't dare make an honest argument. If they were saying what they believe, it would go roughly this way:

"The internet threatens our longstanding control of information and communications, and that is simply unacceptable. Therefore, it is essential to curb the utility of the internet for everyone else."

Some Sopa opponents have their own semi-blind spot. We are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge that, despite the copyright industry's blatantly bogus claims about losses from infringement, there are at least some losses. But copyright holders have always suffered some losses to infringement. They, and society, lived with the trade-off. Information could spread more widely, with great benefits to all, despite some losses.

The people who want to protect "intellectual property" from all infringement have set up a binary choice. They tell us that if we do not agree to their absolute control, we are endorsing stealing. This is another lie, though it's been an effective one until recently – when people began to realize what was at stake.

In fact, if the issue is binary, it can be framed as a choice between no freedom of speech and freedom of speech. After all, the logical extension of absolute control is a permission-based information economy, in which we need permission to quote anyone else. And since all journalism and entertainment is built upon borrowing from other creators, nothing new could be legally created without permission.

It can also be framed as needing permission to innovate – one of the clear effects of Sopa and other such bills. Because they would give Hollywood and other IP owners easy ways to shut down new ideas simply based on allegations, investors would stop funding most things that didn't have prior assent from the various existing cartels. This is not speculation: major technology investors have said precisely this.

Two of my own websites will go dark Wednesday. Both, as well as my books, are published under Creative Commons licenses that permit free copying and distribution of my work for non-commercial uses. My first book has been available as a free download since 2004, when it was first published. Last week, I received the latest in a steady series of royalty checks from the publisher. This is not counter-intuitive. It is the reality of the world we now inhabit.
The lawmakers and Murdochs and Hollywood types and others who are trying to lock down this emerging ecosystem are fully aware of how things work. They have what they consider good reasons for their efforts. But if they succeed, they will destroy most of what I and many others have been working toward. They will create an information monocolture where regimes work with corporations to control more than what we can read, hear and watch, because they will control how we can speak beyond the room we're in at the moment.

The stakes are that high. I wish they didn't understand what they're doing, but they are too smart to know otherwise.

To: English Wikipedia Readers and Community
From: Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director
Date: January 16, 2012

Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate – that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.

This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made. Here’s how it’s been described by the three Wikipedia administrators who formally facilitated the community’s discussion. From the public statement, signed by User:NuclearWarfare, User:Risker and User:Billinghurst:

It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.

Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a "blackout" of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.

On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations.

In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them.

But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

The decision to shut down the English Wikipedia wasn’t made by me; it was made by editors, through a consensus decision-making process. But I support it.

Like Kat and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation Board, I have increasingly begun to think of Wikipedia’s public voice, and the goodwill people have for Wikipedia, as a resource that wants to be used for the benefit of the public. Readers trust Wikipedia because they know that despite its faults, Wikipedia’s heart is in the right place. It’s not aiming to monetize their eyeballs or make them believe some particular thing, or sell them a product. Wikipedia has no hidden agenda: it just wants to be helpful.

That’s less true of other sites. Most are commercially motivated: their purpose is to make money. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a desire to make the world a better place – many do! – but it does mean that their positions and actions need to be understood in the context of conflicting interests.

My hope is that when Wikipedia shuts down on January 18, people will understand that we’re doing it for our readers. We support everyone’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. We think everyone should have access to educational material on a wide range of subjects, even if they can’t pay for it. We believe in a free and open Internet where information can be shared without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States, don’t advance the interests of the general public. You can read a very good list of reasons to oppose SOPA and PIPA here, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Why is this a global action, rather than US-only? And why now, if some American legislators appear to be in tactical retreat on SOPA?

The reality is that we don’t think SOPA is going away, and PIPA is still quite active. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the Internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.

On January 18, we hope you’ll agree with us, and will do what you can to make your own voice heard.

Sue Gardner,
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Make your voice heard!