Wiki Up or Down

Chris Lemler | January 19, 2012
Why is the government trying to censor the internet?

Scott Hardie | January 20, 2012
The bill was about the entertainment industry getting Congress to give them even better tools to combat online piracy, and the protests online were about the bill being way too broad and overreaching. Under SOPA as it was first written, a company could merely claim that Funeratic was hosting copyrighted movies or songs, and my site could be shut down in the blink of an eye.

MetaFilter was once nearly shut down because Sony's bots had misidentified them as hosting a Michael Jackson song. Under the law at the time, they had 30 days to prove that they were innocent of this, and it took half of that time -- under SOPA, the site would just be wiped from the Internet instantly. What happened to innocent until proven guilty, anyway?

The entertainment industry needs to deal with piracy, and the current tools they have are neither effective at stopping the pirates nor fair to the (many) people erroneously accused. But more powerful tools that basically do the same thing aren't going work any better. Pirates are as persistent a pest as roaches, and the industry is dealing with these "roaches" by stomping on the ones they see, but they know there are countless more lurking out of sight -- so the solution is to get heavier shoes to stomp with?

The Register published a pretty good analysis of why the protestors' victory over SOPA this week is nothing to cheer about: It's an unreasonable response to an unreasonable solution, and there's no hope any time soon of the problem really being solved, so we're going to keep seeing more unreasonable solutions.

For my part, I thought briefly about participating in the protest via Funeratic. But it should go without saying that I'm opposed to SOPA, and there wasn't one of you here who wasn't aware of the problem via the many larger sites participating in the protest, so I didn't see the good to come from investing the time.