Experts see larger issues in Wikipedia’s cyber-protest over online legislation
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A cyber-protest aimed at calling attention to proposed legislation to stop online piracy is a novel way to use technology, says the head of a technology center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
But the issues underlying the protest - in which the ubiquitous website Wikipedia went dark for 24 hours - are not new, says Ethan Katsh, director of the 13-year-old Center for Information Technology and Dispute Resolution at UMass.
The online organizing against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion bill, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), "gives us a glimpse into how protests may be different in the future," Katsh said. "But these are issues that have been playing out for a long time. It has to do with who owns information and how it can be used to create knowledge."
Josh Levy, Internet campaign director for the Florence nonprofit Free Press, sees Wednesday's online protest as a sign of how a free and open Internet serves democracy. The websites of Free Press and other organizations, including the local Blue Mass Group, also went dark for the day.
"It took online activism to a new level," Levy said. "It's gratifying to see people uniting to defend the openness of the Internet."
He rejected the "clash of titans" interpretation of the SOPA/PIPA protest as being merely a battle between industries.
"Wikipedia is not a titan, it represents a whole body of people," Levy said. "What Wikipedia and Google did was get these issues out in the open. They are listening to millions of people online who have already been speaking out in support of an open Internet."
The stated purpose of the two bills now being debated in Congress is to prevent foreign-owned websites from stealing online content by requiring Internet service providers to block their access.
The legislation's main backers, including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, say online piracy costs their industries as much as $250 billion and hundreds of thousands of jobs each year.
Critics - including the giant Internet search engine Google and online encyclopedia Wikipedia - say the legislation goes too far and would end up censoring Web content and curbing public access to information.
"The Internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a posting Wednesday on his Facebook page. "We can't let poorly thought-out laws get in the way of the Internet's development."
By Wednesday afternoon, numerous lawmakers had come out against the bills, including at least one former sponsor, Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri.
U.S. Rep. John Olver, D-Amherst, said in a statement that the bills should be rewritten to avoid granting "expansive new cyber-police powers that could threaten the freedom and dynamism of the Internet."
While the political debate over the legislation has been painted as Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley, Katsh of UMass sees larger issues at stake.
"Whenever a new technology is developed or extended, the capabilities change," he said. "Is the Interent simply a lot of data or a body of knowledge that leads to the creation of more knowledge? It's an ongoing challenge to figure out how those boundaries should be drawn."
Katsh, whose center aims to use technology to resolve disputes, noted that when videotaping technology was developed 30 years ago, the entertainment industry claimed it would be enormously harmful. "Instead, it turned out to be of value to that industry," Katsh said.
While recent court cases against downloading music from the Internet have been decided in favor of the music industry, new technologies continue to be developed that are making access to information easier, he said.
"These days, the capability for distributing and accessing information and processing and manipulating information are available at a very low cost," Katsh noted. "The basic question is, how do you control the flow of information in that kind of technological environment?"
That's a question that Northampton attorney Amanda Schreyer has been looking at for years. As an intellectual property lawyer with the downtown firm of Fierst & Kane, she serves clients on both sides of the online copyright issue.
"I post about it all the time," Schreyer said. "This is something that touches so many people's lives."
Schreyer said she is concerned that the remedies proposed in SOPA and PIPA bills are overly broad. For example, SOPA and PIPA would allow the U.S. attorney general's office to remove sites from the Internet if they violate copyright rules. "While the language of the bills intends to target foreign-based sites only, the government would also be allowed to make American search engines and payment processors cut ties with these sites," Schreyer said. "So even if a foreign site shows 99 legitimate works and one infringing one, the entire site can be shut down and Americans would lose access to that site."
Schreyer said she sympathizes with the need to prevent the online theft of intellectual property. But she believes the legislation, as drafted, adds a complex layer of government intervention that could lead to censorship.
"The difference with this law is it's not just two private parties," Schreyer said. "It allows the government to take entire websites off the Internet."
