The day Wikipedia went dark – Will SOPA take the internet back to the dark ages?

As a former English student I can’t help but think back to the times of Shakespeare (yes, Shakespeare!). Arguably the greatest writer ever born, he was a man who plagiarized more literature than I’ve had hot dinners, but was allowed free reign to craft beautifully written plays from some rather dull Roman and Greek poetry. The plays of the Elizabethan period were creative, expressive and ‘open’ because of plagiarism. Literature became a lot duller because of copyright. Will a similar fate befall the web?

In the old days (I’m talking circa 1995, not Shakespearian times) the internet’s biggest player was AOL, the largest ISP (internet service provider) in the US. AOL provided content to subscribers only, we call this a ‘walled garden’. Once Google came along and decided to ‘organize the world’s information’, the concept of a walled garden on the web became passée, as websites saw the benefit of gaining traffic from Google to drive advertising revenues, the main profit vehicle for web publishers online. Since then the web has been a free and open space, for the most part, for people to share information. This was great for technology start ups like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and indeed Google. These brands facilitate the sharing of content without actually producing content themselves. They profit from other people’s content by selling digital advertising space. It was the traditional publishers that suffered as a consequence. Newspapers were the first to take a battering as written content is so easily shared and distributed online. We then saw Napster and the like eat the profits of large corporate recording companies and the music industry had to find other ways to make money. We’re now seeing Hollywood get bitten as DVD sales see a sharp decline and broadband speeds improve; you can now watch a film on YouTube for £3. Book publishers have been taking a similar beating from Amazon*. It’s only a matter of time that television and radio production companies and networks suffer at the hand of the open web.

That is, until SOPA came along. SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy. It’s a proposed US legislation which aims to protect copyright material on the web. What this means is that if Google links to a website which allows you to watch an illegally downloaded film, Google can be prosecuted and shut down. It also means that if I post a copyrighted image on this blog, I can be prosecuted and shut down (don’t say anything!). To confuse matters, there’s another legislation, PIPA (the sister legislation of SOPA, (the senate version for those of you who know a lot about US politics) which is less severe in that it doesn’t penalise owners of copyright material which wrongly accuse** websites of hosting copyright material without permission. Both proposed legislations come from the same place, it’s the traditional Hollywood execs who don’t have a clue how the internet actually works, who are fighting for SOPA to be passed. This is why the legislation is so severe, and why the likes of Wikipedia went dark last week.

Traditional media companies have not taken their demise well. Rupert “I knew nothing of the hacking scandal” Murdoch has spoken out against Google, “a company that creates no content of its own, and makes money solely on the backs of other people’s content, raking in billions through advertising and IPOs”***. This is true. Google is making a hell of a lot of money by ranking other people’s content, as does Wikipedia, Nathanlevi.com, Twitter, Facebook and any other web property which allows the sharing of content. I’m loathe to say it, but Murdoch has a point. But can we envisage a web which doesn’t allow the sharing of content freely and openly? I certainly can’t.

The battle between Hollywood and the technology giants has been an issue ever since the early days of the web. Infringing copyright is actually dealt with by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The problem with it is that in the US it doesn’t stop a ‘foreign’ website from hosting copyrighted material. SOPA can’t make foreign sites take down this content, but it can enforce the likes of Google.com not to link to these sites, or face shutting down.

Do I think SOPA will actually happen? Probably not. Do I think there will be more restrictions on the web that will make the ‘open web’ a bit more closed. Absolutely. We might be looking at a two tiered web, one in which a lot of content is behind a walled garden, and a lot of content is still free, hosted in the cloud and out of SOPA and PIPA’s reach. It may even mean the return of AOL (perish the thought), and the decline of sites that can’t or won’t police their content. Great for Murdoch, crapola for us.

The most irksome thing about all of this is that it could so easily be resolved. It’s not inconceivable that traditional content providers and technology companies can share the wealth of the web. It’s just that both are so proud and arrogant they can’t seem to agree on anything. Google has flagrantly ignored piracy issues in the past (ie. when they decided to publish excerpts of in-print books without asking the publishers’ permission in 2005), whilst Murdoch continues to battle the inevitable to spite himself (by fire-walling News International web properties). Nobody wants to share, and what a pity this is.

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. For now I shall quote Mr Albert Einstein:

“I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.”

*http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/apple-isnt-the-only-disruptor-how-amazon-is-killing-publishers/

**http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-01/17/sopa-101

***Planet Google – Randall Stross (p.104)