Ed Note: If you would like to comment on this article, you can leave comments on the Weekender that followed up this page. Other than this note, the page will be preserved in its current state.
Oh No, What’s This? A 1-18-2012 Blackout?
There are currently two very dangerous bills working the way through the Legislative Branch of the United States – the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate. Flying under the false flag of ‘piracy prevention’, these two bills are loaded with the sort of vague language which is bound to cause unintended (or, for all we know, intended) consequences of the censorship kind.
Don’t Quit Your Day Job is in favor of the status quo – the Technology Industry works perfectly well under current conditions – there is no need to rock the boat. There is no need for any legislation which affects domestic sites (they can already be shut down due to piracy). The truth is, the internet already operates just fine under two laws:
- The Digital Millennium Copyright Act – which details how copyright protection works on the internet and
- Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act - (Most of the act was struck down in the Supreme Court) Which states that service providers aren’t responsible for the actions of third parties.
Are you with me? Look up the contact numbers of your representatives on this page and send them a message.
We’ll be back with your regularly scheduled programming tomorrow (there will probably be a graph!).
Posted 12/17/2011
So this web site is on the internet. You like the internet, right? Yeah, me too. Here’s the thing – the internet works perfectly well in its current state. Businesses based on the online economy start and die daily, which is generally regarded as a Good Thing. All of this in the lightly regulated “Wild West” of the World Wide Web.
The Internet has a problem – and that problem is creeping regulation. Last year, the FCC received powers to police ‘Net Neutrality’. Sounds like a good thing, right? Well, give any government agency a loosely defined term to achieve and it’s like throwing red meat to a pack of wolves. Okay, fine, net neutrality – great, let’s give them that one. Let’s talk about SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act.
Again, on the surface, the title hearkens to the pirates of real life – raping, pillaging and plundering on the high seas (oh no! We have to do something!). However, the devil is in the details. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act allowed sites to form organically, so long as they complied with any takedown notices from copyright holders. SOPA removes that protection. It will allow some entity to either shut down sites (through a mechanism like removing DNS entries) or pull advertisers. Note also, that they define pirates as not just sites that host content… no that would make too much sense. It would also define a pirate as a site linking to a pirate site. How does that affect user driven content or search engines? You tell me – what search engine doesn’t link to pirated content?
And therein lies the problem. You get a few entrenched interests, like the MPAA and the RIAA and on the other side of millions of tiny sites with no political clout and a few hyperlinks to shady corners of the web. The danger isn’t so much in the law – it’s what is guaranteed to be selective enforcement. Selective enforcement is demonstrated by the sheer number of rules around something… take driving, for example. There is little chance you can drive and not break some regulation. The police will let it slide, unless they don’t like you for some reason. At that point they’re sure to find you were speeding, driving in the left lane when the right lane was open, or some other infraction that usually is ignored. Get on the wrong side of a powerful industry? Guarantee some piece of this law will stretch to fit you. Google, Yahoo, and the big sites? They can fight, no problem. The tiny sites? I doubt they have much chance in a protracted legal battle.
This is what happens when you let an entity like Congress make laws about something they don’t understand. Seriously, former Senator Ted Stevens even tried to liken the Internet to a series of tubes. Don’t forget that Stevens was on the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. I hope the irony doesn’t escape you – it’s the Dilbert Principle to the extreme.
So, there you have it. We’ll see what happens when an entity that knows barely anything about the Internet decides to fundamentally change its balance…
