Today's Classroom Excuse: SOPA Ate My Homework

As you may have discovered this morning, a number of prominent websites have gone dark to protest the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation being debated in Congress.

So what is this all about? Consistent with Washington's penchant for marketing the Big Lie, SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA stands for Protect Intellectual Property Act. Their sponsors claim that they are designed to protect US citizens - and their information - from dark, malign foreign forces intent on stealing all the value Americans are creating online. Sounds very 'mom and apple pie,' which is what Americans say when referring to unassailable moral values.

The reality, as you may have suspected, is quite different. The two acts are primarily sponsored by conservative Republicans and their key backer - could this possibly be a surprise - Rupert Murdoch. The delicious irony of a man who has been forced to testify before the UK Parliament to answer for his companies' depredations against the privacy, reputation or personal property of everyone else in the world, then touting the importance of anti-piracy legislation has not been lost.

But this is also being billed as a contest between the big media companies, such as those owned by Mr. Murdoch, in New York and Los Angeles versus the tech industry. As a simple business proposition, the media companies want to charge for any information or entertainment they can; the tech companies see value in providing the content for free and then selling advertising around it. As a political proposition, the sponsors want to ensure that moderate, progressive and liberal groups such as Wikileaks and OWS are not able to use the net to share knowledge about their beliefs, organizing drives and actions. The bills would make it much harder for ordinary citizens to get access to much information and data by restricting access through various Kafkaesque means.

And, as Dan Pink humorously notes, high school students the world over who use Wikipedia to write reports and papers (usually against the advice of their teachers) will be bereft if this passes. They may even have to go back to using books. In libraries. Those that have not been shuttered due to budgetary cuts, that is.

So today's blackouts are intended to serve as a warning of what might happen should the legislation pass. It will be frustrating, it will limit dissemination of knowledge and it will make our light-speed life more difficult. Given the premium consumer/voters now place on convenience, any politician trying to roll back that tide is likely to drown. And today's protest may be the first example of how networked, crowd-sourced protest flexes its muscles in the US. JL

Dan Pink comments in his blog:

In case you haven’t heard, several large websites have blacked themselves out today to protest two pieces of anti-piracy legislation now before the U.S. Congress.

Leaving aside the merits of their arguments, which I think outweigh the merits of the legislation’s advocates’ arguments, I’ve got two questions.
1. Will Wikipedia’s 24-hour disappearance have a material effect on anyone’s life? (I’m talking about you, students and journalists.) If so, that’s pretty amazing — given how preposterous the very concept of Wikipedia seemed not too long ago.

2. Will the web blackout become a prominent new form of social protest? As a long-time resident of America’s capital city, I’m convinced that the “March on Washington” technique passed its sell-by date last century. If this is the replacement, or even a quasi-replacement, then we’re watching history in action.

Maybe we’ll know the answers tomorrow. At the very least, we’ll be able to finally find out the capital of Slovakia.