WIRED: AS MANY of you may have noticed, last Wednesday saw a protest by US websites against the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa). Wikipedia took its site offline and Google censored its own logo.
remember the first internet blackout day, on February 8th, 1996. Yahoo turned its front page black, as did thousands of sites, in protest of the signing into law of the Communications Decency Act, another US proposal to place roadblocks on the net.
The censorship clauses of that act were struck down by the US courts four months later in a decision that was upheld by the Supreme Court less than two years after the bill’s signing.
The bill’s dismissal by the lower court in Philadelphia was resounding. “As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed,” it said, “the internet deserves the highest protection from governmental intrusion.”
The act was passed into law by the US congress. The target of the new protests – Sopa – may yet make it that far, but it seems increasingly unlikely.
The most contentious parts of the bill, which would have granted the US government and litigants the ability to effectively seize domain names of websites and block them from being used within the US, has been largely removed. Outside its sponsors in the entertainment industry, there seems little support for the legislation.
Protests like this underline how many challenges to internet freedom there appear to be in the so-called land of the free, but there is always a risk to such Americano-centricism. We hear of these protests because so many of us use US-based websites.
Even if the Google protest was limited to an American audience, and Wikipedia chose to shut down only its English language version, we still know those brands well enough to understand (and experience) the impact of the statement.
What’s sadly true, however, is that similar filtering and deletions go on across the world, with far more limited publicity or outcry.
In the UK, sites are silently blocked via an internet blacklist maintained with little oversight or publicity. The British government asked for and received potentially similar powers to Sopa to seize domain names. The UK domain name service, Nominet, says it assisted in 3,000 such seizures at the request of the police with no fuss or outrage.
In Ireland, ComReg manages the rules for revoking domain names, having taken over regulation of the .ie domain process in 2007. Currently, the Government is under the same type of pressure that US politicians have received from the entertainment industries.
The music labels are currently suing the State to press it to introduce a statutory instrument which would let them demand that piracy sites be blocked at the internet service provider level.
Such local plans don’t receive the same attention as a blackout of the US Wikipedia site obtains, yet they are just as significant.
The strongest argument against any net censorship is that it is futile or technologically impossible or strange and unusual. The judges who threw out the Communications Decency Act in 1996 did so partly because no other country had passed or enforced such laws.
The strongest counter- argument is that similar laws pass in other countries, with few ill-effects, or that it is just normal international practice.
“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t [do business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites,” noted Chris Dodds, head of the US film lobbying group the Motion Picture Authority of America.
It is, perhaps, not the best comparison that the copyright industries might have chosen, given the West’s consistent criticism of the censoring of the Chinese internet. But each country which allows anyone to block or filter its internet increases the notion that every country should do so.
US lobbyists certainly know this – restrictions in US copyright law have been spread and encouraged outside America through the negotiation of bilateral free trade agreements which contain equivalents to domestic law.
When the US refused to extend copyright in the late 20th century, American lobbyists took their case to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a United Nations agency which embodied it into international treaties which almost every country in the world then signed.
In that regard, despite the endless attempts by its politicians and lobbyists to control the internet, the United States still stands as a flickering candle for freedom from online censorship.
US corporations may throw politically contentious websites like Wikileaks off their servers, but the infrastructure itself is not yet blocked or censored in a centralised way. There is no government blacklist in the United States, as there is in China or Australia or Germany or Thailand or the United Kingdom.
US copyright still allows a large number of non-commercial use of copyrighted material under the American courts’ theory of “fair use”, providing a defence for creative internet use.
It is partly this sense of freedom and court-tolerated experimentation that allowed the Googles and Wikipedias of the world to gain a stronghold based in the United States.
It is understandable, therefore, that they might want to keep it that way. Dozens of tech companies and non-profits, including many beyond its shores, stood together to protest a law they said would censor them.
The question is: if the Government here publishes its promised statutory instrument regarding such censorship this month, will Irish tech companies make a similar fuss?
