Salon.com > Stop Online Piracy Act

Protest drags down Europe’s SOPA

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:45:00 +0000

"I will not take part in this masquerade," wrote the European Union's special rapporteur for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, as he tendered his resignation last month. Since then, opposition to the international pact on so-called intellectual property has swelled. The popular fervor that thwarted the Stop Online Piracy Act in the United States has gone global.

Thousands marched in the streets of Europe last weekend, with protests reported in Budapest, Paris, Prague, Vilnius, Transylvania and beyond. Bulgaria has pulled out of the process of signing ACTA, as the agreement is known. Latvia has called for greater consultation. Poland has suspended its involvement. And Germany is holding off, as are the Czech and Slovak governments. Hollywood had expected a neat and tidy ending to the years-long negotiation of a new global copyright regime. What it has gotten is something as complex as a Fellini film.

Where does the anti-SOPA movement go next?

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

The last few weeks have witnessed a remarkable convergence of conflicts over copyright: the arrest of Megaupload mastermind “Kim Dotcom” in New Zealand, an unprecedented show of unity among Internet giants such as Wikipedia and Google to fight anti-piracy legislation in Congress, and similar protests in Poland against new copyright measures. In a world wracked by recession, war and revolution, a topic oft-dismissed by journalists as “arcane” — copyright — has surged to the top of the political agenda.

Indeed, supporters of anti-piracy legislation in Congress have confessed their ignorance of how copyright and the Internet work, saying the details were best left to the “nerds.” Lawmakers soon heard from the nerds, though, as an online insurgency spread to thwart the Stop Online Piracy Act, galvanizing opposition across the political spectrum in a novel way, from the Creative Commons left to right-wing blogs such as RedState. The campaign epitomizes a promising new turn in American politics, as critics of intellectual property law finally find an audience and, more important, the makings of a political constituency.

The SOPA battle in a wider war

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000

The Internet blackouts to protest the pending Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act legislation currently working their way through the U.S. House and Senate have ignited a much-needed discussion of the question of censorship in the United States — though the discussion ought to go much further than it has so far.

One of the most striking things about the debate around SOPA and PIPA, in fact, is that the question of censorship has drawn as much attention as it has partly because it is a byproduct of a battle pitting one set of American corporate interests against another: those who generate “content” against those who maintain the electronic infrastructure in which creative material (copyrighted and otherwise) can be produced, disseminated and accessed. Or, to be slightly more reductive about it, the struggle pits Hollywood (the Motion Picture Association of America, the Directors Guild, American Federation of Musicians, etc.) against Silicon Valley (Google, eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.). It’s little wonder that the Electronic Frontier Foundation went so far as to say that SOPA finally gives Hollywood “a chance to break the Internet,” since that is how the legislative campaign is being pitched.

Reid bows to online protest

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:19:00 +0000

After Wednesday's one-day blackout of Wikipedia, Craigslist and scores of other sites to protest the House of Representatives' Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate companion, Protect IP Act; after Google's collection of a reported 7 million petition signatures; after seven co-sponsors of the Senate bill repudiated it and dozens of other rejected it, attention turned to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a supporter of the legislation. What would he do in response to the historic digital outcry?

On Friday morning, Reid settled the matter. "In light of recent events," read a statement sent out by his office, "I have decided to postpone Tuesday's vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act."

The move by Reid to hit pause on the bill, known as PIPA, is a big deal -- not least as an acknowledgment that online protest is shaping his agenda.

Internet blackout!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:30:00 +0000

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

It's been more than 18 years since John Gilmore offered up his famous explanation of why the Internet is the most powerful tool for free speech ever invented. That's long enough for an entire generation of Wikipedia-using, Etsy-shopping, Reddit-browsing and Facebook-sharing Internet users to be born, raised and apply to college. But as some members of that generation may discover on Wednesday, when they log on to their favorite website and discover it dark and silent, Gilmore's insight has rarely been more relevant than it is today.

Some very well known and highly popular websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, effectively turned themselves off today, acting in protest of proposed congressional legislation that they believe poses a stark, existential threat to the core architecture of the free and open Internet.

In other words, the operators of these websites have decided that two bills currently under consideration in the U.S. Congress -- SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, in the House; and, in the Senate, PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act -- represent "damage." And so they're routing around it, by any means necessary, including, ironically, purposely damaging themselves, albeit temporarily.

Left and right, Congress resists the Stop Online Piracy Act

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

As the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) rages on in Washington, California Rep. Darrell Issa – perhaps best known in these parts for being a frequent, and spirited, critic of the Obama administration – is agitating for an alternative measure that can win the support of SOPA's many critics in the online world. In doing so, Issa is engaging in a congressional demonstration of the fact that Marshall McLuhan was right: here, the medium truly is the message.

Issa's bill is called the OPEN Act, or the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (the acronym comes from fudging a bit – picking up the first two letters of “enforcement” and ignoring everything that follows). Where SOPA aims to empower the Justice Department to go after websites that allegedly infringe on copyright, and doing it on the Internet’s domain name layer, OPEN goes another route: strictly limiting the bill to foreign sites, setting up the International Trade Commission as the enforcer, and focusing on a “follow the money” approach, as in using digital payment systems as the choke points on targeted sites, a mechanism that has worked to thwart the WikiLeaks movement. On cue, the Motion Picture Association of America, a major SOPA backer, dismissed OPEN as “go[ing] easy on Internet piracy.”

Congress seeks to tame the Internet

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Ever since the days of Napster, the recording industry and movie industry have treated the Internet as a place on the map marked "Here be dragons." For the last decade, Hollywood and big music have spent time not innovating, but trying to get the U.S. Congress to help them tame the Internet. Over the years, they've floated a variety of legislative mechanisms to do that. The latest is a House bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as it is known, has Internet advocates boiling -- and with good reason.