Last week marked an extraordinary milestone in the relationship between the internet and politics. The signs that the internet is changing the way that governments and politics work have been there for a while. Barack Obama was arguably the first US Presidential candidate to harness the power of social media to win his election campaign in 2008. More recently the internet caused governments to topple as activists took to blogs and social networks to influence events happening on the ground in the Arab Spring. Last week, for the first time, web-based activism had a direct and highly visible impact on the US congressional process.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) had until very recently had little or no coverage outside of the United States and their passage through Congress seemed all but assured. Support was strong both in the Senate and the House of Representatives judiciary committees. A powerful lobbying triumvirate of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the US Chamber of Commerce and the Recording Industry Association of America was right behind it. Surely, the passing of these Acts were no-brainers?
Well, no, actually.
The way in which the digital world responded, rose up and rallied against these Acts was unprecedented and thus not even anticipated. It’s estimated that 13 million people were involved in last Wednesday’s online protest, with around 50,000 websites going dark during the day. Online opponents sent an estimated 3 million protest emails to Congress. High profile backers of SOPA pulled out and Congress postponed the debate until a compromise could be reached. Internet users across the world joined together and changed the course of US politics.
So what caused this overwhelmingly negative response to what seems on the face of it to be a good thing? Online piracy and intellectual property theft are both bad, right?
Freedom of information was at the heart of this protest, though I would say that misinformation and scaremongering were both large contributors to the mêlée. How many people saw Wikipedia’s black out and a headline reading ‘SOPA will kill the internet as we know it’ and jumped on the bandwagon without knowing any of the facts? Millions I suspect – this is the nature of the internet… pre-SOPA/PIPA at least!
So what were the facts? SOPA would have allowed for the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders requiring Internet Service Providers to cut off access to any foreign websites that were accused of copyright infringement. That would include infringing material posted on a single blog or webpage. It would also require search engines to remove all results pointing those sites, and ad platforms to halt all advertising on them.
At the risk of committing copyright infringement myself, the team over at Mashable have posted a long and detailed blog about ‘Why SOPA is dangerous’, summarising with three main points:
- SOPA gave the US government the right to unilaterally censor foreign websites
- SOPA gave copyright holders the right to issue economic takedowns and bring lawsuits against website owners and operators, if those websites have features that make it possible to post infringing content.
- SOPA made it a felony offense to post a copyrighted song or video.
The devil was in the detail (or lack thereof) for this Act. There wasn’t any qualification that the offending site needed to be solely for the purpose of theft, only that it enabled it. Unfortunately the Act didn’t give any allowance for the fact that the internet has made copyright violation absurdly easy. Theoretically it left any site with a comment box or picture upload form at risk of infringment. As the owner of a site, you would be liable for any copyright infringement committed by your users. So site owners would be left having to check the content of every post or comment against copyright theft – not particularly cost-effective if you are Facebook or YouTube!
SOPA and PIPA were written by politicians who clearly had very little understanding of the nature of the internet in today’s society. The driving force behind the Acts seemed sensible enough – copyright infringement and piracy are both issues that need to be tackled. However, the way they had been written could have created situation where innovation online became stifled as experimentation left pacesetters open to too great a risk.
What we have seen in the last week is the power of the internet as a lobbying tool, the signature collection of the digital age. In this instance it has created an opportunity for US politicians to re-think an Act that had potentially damaging economic and social implications.
Beyond that though, this episode offers some serious connotations for the future of politics and government as we know it. If big corporations can launch an internet campaign to raise mass-awareness of an issue they feel strongly about and change the opinions of our elected representatives – without much explanation of the reasoning behind their stance – where does that leave the mandate of an elected government?
Blog post by Penny Anderson, Consultant at Reform



