Revenge of the Internet Nerds
Clarence Page

Fear the Wiki-power! A historic online protest by Wikipedia and other websites against proposed antipiracy legislation has startled web surfers, stunned Hollywood and stopped Congress in its tracks. Call this movie "Revenge of the Computer Nerds."

It's a tangled saga, but this much is clear: Putting the handcuffs on Internet piracy is a worthy goal. Unfortunately, Congress, urged by a nervous entertainment industry, threatens to pass remedies that could be worse than the disease.

The problem is not trivial. As much as 6 percent of the U.S. gross national product is generated by industries supported by intellectual property laws, according to a recent Congressional Quarterly report, which found that almost one-fourth of all Internet traffic worldwide infringes on copyright laws.

Website operators say Hollywood and its lobbyists have pretty much had their way in influencing antipiracy legislation. Numerous laws to restrain the Web have been passed since the mid-1990s. But SOPA and PIPA are the last straw.

For the uninitiated, no, I am not referring to a couple of participants in the latest British royal wedding.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, in the House and the Protect IP (Intellectual Property) Act, or PIPA, in the Senate are proposed antipiracy laws. Their intent essentially is to create a blacklist of foreign sites suspected of piracy and give federal authorities more power to crack down on them. However, the law's powers are so broadly defined, many fear, that the result will be censorship and a big intimidating chill on Internet freedom.

Reddit, a social news website where registered users submit content, announced they would go dark on Jan. 18 to protest SOPA. Others followed, but the protest gained hurricane strength when Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, announced that the immensely popular nonprofit online encyclopedia would go dark, too.

That was a big deal. Wikipedia is the fifth most popular website, according to an October report by Alexa Internet. It receives a staggering 25 million hits a day, according to comScore. For one day, all of those visitors learned about SOPA and PIPA, whether they previously had heard of the bills or not.

Among other protesters, Google posted a black banner over their logo and referred users to an online petition to Congress. It collected more than 7 million signatures, spokesmen said. That was enough to send quite a number of lawmakers into backflips, running away from SOPA and PIPA. Two days later, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, announced a PIPA vote scheduled for Tuesday (Jan. 24) the vote would be delayed. Translation: The bill no longer had the votes it needed.

Rewriting the bill in a way that can satisfy both the websites and the copyright holders won't be easy. Both sides oppose piracy, but they're far apart on how best to fight it.

For now, our existing federal laws aren't bad, as evidenced by a major FBI bust of the file-sharing giant Megaupload on the day after the Wiki-blackout. Seven people were charged, some of them in New Zealand, with running an international Internet piracy enterprise. As a backhanded salute, the shadowy hacker network Anonymous retaliated with a mass Internet attack, including the websites of the FBI and corporations backing the antipiracy law.

Can we all get along? The Megaupload bust, after a two-year probe, shows the current laws work. But Hollywood can lose a fortune in profits waiting for those laws to be enforced. Yet, even as Congress tries to catch up, the technology and marketplace constantly move ahead. CDs and DVDs, for example, are fading as free or low-cost music and video streaming, some of it supported by advertisers, rises. Surveys indicate that free or low-cost streaming is having what one expert called a "Netflix effect," effectively competing against the pirates.

I understand why the movie and music industries are impatient. They want new models in the Internet age that will be as profitable as the old ones. As a veteran of the old-school print media, I feel their pain. But media enterprises cannot rely on Congress for our survival or success. Ultimately, movies and music have to compete and keep up with changing times like newspapers do, online or off.