Wikiprotesta

It seems that virtually every post I write these days has to be prefaced by some sort of caveat or another. So here's the one for this post:

I do not now and will not ever support any piece of legislation that allows the government to supress free speech without very, very, very* good reason. And, online speech should be the easiest form of expression to protect.

*I need like a super-italicize button to emphasize this. The only two things I can think of that would warrant government intervention on the internet are 1) something like WikiLeaks, where sensitive information is being handed to America's enemies. That's called espionage, and there are laws against it. 2) websites that exist solely to distributed copyrighted information without a dime of it going to its creators. That's called intellectual property theft, and there are also laws against that.

Oh, and I'm no saint either. I've never bought a Beatles album in my life, but I've got every good album (plus Beatles for Sale) in my iTunes library because of my best friend. But here's the funny thing; I got all the physical discs from him and ripped them onto my computer. You're never going to be able to outlaw that kind of activity.

Having said that...

In an ideal world, I'd be an author. Now in this brave new world we've made for ourselves, the print industry's going to be gone in a few years and everything's going to be online. Copy-protection is not foolproof. I don't imagine it would be very difficult for someone to illegally distribute e-books in much the same way that, for example, people can illegally distribute MP3s.

So online piracy is, believe it or not, a dicey, double-edged sword.

And, despite that platitude about online speech being easy to protect, child pornography is just as illegal online as it is in print, and that's as it should be.

I think that the intentions behind SOPA and PIPA - namely, the protection of intellectual property, without which our economy simply cannot function - were good, even if the end results are horribly controversial. And let's face it, 60-year-old senators who need to be told that the internet is "a series of tubes" should not be in charge of protecting intellectual property online. (This begs the question of who should, and the guy who's against every alphabet agency out there except the FBI and the CIA doesn't have a very good answer for you, sorry.)

And that's where this post should really begin.

As I said, legislation that allows the government to "black out" websites is a blatant violation of the First Amendment and should never pass Congress. It should be protested. I don't have any problem with that. You want to protect intellectual property, fine the people who are stealing and illegally proliferating it.

My problem is the precedent these protests are setting.

My guess is that Jimmy Wales and the other Wikipedia honchos are not apolitical. Yesterday's emergency is today's normality. What's the next piece of legislation Wikipedia will protest?

I recently started watching Caprica again (mostly because I got back into Doctor Who and suckered myself into watching Underworld, and anything compares favorably to that). There's a pivotal scene in which Daniel Graystone tells his board that they can't expect to make a profit off the holobands anymore. He's covering his ass, of course, and is about to unveil the Cylon, but there's a point that he makes that's worth repeating.

The kids expect it to be free. That market's gone.

I know my generation is the most liberal generation in America's history. We grew up after the Cold War was over, so we never learned how bad the Soviet Union was. It's why 53% of the millennials still approve of President Obama's performance when only 45% of the country overall does.

We expect it to be free. We don't like to play by the old rules.

The FBI shut down Megaupload. Anonymous responded by taking down half the government sites on the internet (hyperbole). Silly Uncle Sam; the internet is their turf, didn't you know?

We, the mob of the internet, are used to it being (more or less) totally unregulated.

This is only the first battle (unless you're old enough to remember Napster).

The war will not be pretty.