Posted: 01/18/2012 09:03:57 AM PST
San Francisco: Protest against anti-piracy legislation under waySOPA protest part of growing Silicon Valley-Hollywood beefWikipedia and other websites shut down to protest online piracy billJan 17:
Mercury News editorial: Obama proves he gets it on the online piracy issueWikipedia to go dark to protest online piracy legislationIt wasn't quite the day the music died. But the Internet felt eerie Wednesday as large swaths of the online community went dark in what leaders called an historic protest to kill proposed online anti-piracy legislation.
By day's end, the massive protest appeared to have completely shaken up any political support left for the already imperiled bills in Congress. Florida Sen. Mark Rubio, one of the co-sponsors of legislation in the Senate, backed away from his bill, while others in Congress voiced concerns about rushing too quickly. House Speaker John Boehner acknowledged mid-day that there was a lack of consensus on the legislation.
The scope of the protest and emotional show of solidarity among so many websites
Web's 'cybertantrum' already getting results
offered a stunning spectacle in an online landscape normally consumed by business-as-usual. With thousands of website home pages filled with somber warnings about how the Stop Online Piracy Act would wrap the World Wide Web in a heavy cloak of censorship, the only thing missing was the theme from Jaws. The bill's dreaded acronym -- SOPA -- was squarely in every Web-warrior's crosshairs.
Wikipedia went dark first on Tuesday night, urging visitors to contact their representatives in Congress to ask that the House bill, along with its parallel Protect IP Act now stalled in the Senate, be deep-sixed. Google (GOOG)-goers
found a black-armband where the Google Doodle should have been. And Reddit, the story-sharing site that calls itself "front page of the Internet,'' was vowing "today we fight back.''
The calls and e-mails seem to have scuttled the legislation as currently written, with Rubio warning "Congress should listen and avoid rushing through a bill that could have many unintended consequences.''
"INTERNET GOES ON STRIKE,'' screamed a headline on sopastrike.com, home of the non-profit online-freedom advocacy group Fight for the Future, whose co-founder, Holmes Wilson, said he was blown away by the response of more than 75,000 people who had signed up to strike on their sites, either with total blackouts or by posting a notice.
"Today the Internet is revealing the power it has to defend itself,'' said Holmes, who said nearly 2 million people had visited the strike website by late morning. "But this is about more than just Internet freedom. As we depend more and more on technology, all of our freedoms are in the balance, because they all depend on a free and open Internet and that's being threatened.''
By late afternoon, the strike website had had nearly 2 million visitors who had clicked through to send 350,000 e-mails to Congress and "sopa'' had been tweeted 3 million times, according to the tweet-metering site Topsy. Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg considered the bills such a threat that he Tweeted his opposition.
"Tell your congressmen you want them to be pro-internet,'' he wrote, reportedly his first appearance on Twitter in almost three years.
Critics of the two bills, which are opposed by the Obama administration, say the tools proposed to stop the spread of pirated copies of movies and other content by "rogue'' websites overseas could easily be abused. They complain the language is vague and sets up the possibility of intermediaries either shutting down legitimate websites or prompting self-censorship by websites worried about their potential liability.
The Hollywood movie industry leaders, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and labor groups who support the bills say they're necessary to protect content providers like artists and musicians who are getting ripped off by rogue websites beyond the enforcement reach of American authorities.
Ultimately, the debate over the bills represents a monumental face-off between two behemoths of American business -- the content creators and the tech companies that deliver that content to the masses.
The money behind the posturing is massive. Both Hollywood and Silicon Valley spend generously to lobby causes in Washington. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the movie, television and music industries spent a combined $91.7 million on lobbying efforts in 2011, compared with the computer and Internet industry's $93 million.
But Wednesday was all about the critics. And by all measures, their efforts seemed to be paying off. Presumably hundreds of millions of Google users were getting a quick education on the bills, albeit with a biased perspective. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation that runs Wikipedia, said by mid-day 100,000 people had clicked through the blacked-out English Wikipedia site to contact their representatives in Washington.
"We're getting huge interest from readers and the media and seeing massive amounts of Twitter traffic around this,'' said Walsh, who said the site normally gets between 100 and 150 million visitors a day. Some users were furious after finding the encyclopedia site shut down, but Walsh said "our hope is that people who read Wikipedia will understand the threat of SOPA and PIPA and help us put them down for good.''
That appeared to be already underway in Washington, as several members of Congress said the legislation appeared stalled, with some reversing earlier support for the measures. As Rubio withdrew as a co-sponsor of PIPA in the Senate, Reps. Lee Terry, R-Neb, and Ben Quayle, R-Ariz, said they were pulling their names from the companion House bill. Meanwhile, Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, called on Congress to take more time to work on the bills.
"Better to get this done right rather than fast and wrong," Cornyn said on his Facebook page. "Stealing content is theft, plain and simple, but concerns about unintended damage to the internet and innovation in the tech sector require a more thoughtful balance, which will take more time."
Rubio also joined several other Republicans in calling for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, to delay a vote on PIPA scheduled for next Tuesday.
"Members of Congress need to hear about the consequences of SOPA, and when they do, they'll learn of the serious consequences to the Internet the bill poses,'' said Rep. Anna G. Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, ranking member on the Communications and Technology Subcommittee. "It's time to pull up the emergency brake on this legislation."
And to make sure everyone knew where she stood on the bills, Eshoo blacked out her own website, with a simple message dead-center in the home page: ''STOP SOPA/PIPA''.
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