Throwing the baby…

The day the LOLcats died” is a mournful ditty about what could happen if SOPA and PIPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act — are enacted in the United States. The proposed legislation threatens to erase entire services off the Web (in the US) if they find copyright infringement,and a single file would be enough to declare a foreign website rogue. (This,obviously,has large implications for Indian Web services as well.)

Though the debate has been brewing for months now,between digital activists and entertainment lobbies,many of us only noticed when Wikipedia,that vital part of our lives,along with other sites like Reddit and Boing Boing,faded to black on Wednesday,to warn of a dark,silent future. Even the Obama Administration has made its problems with the bill clear,saying it will “not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression,increases cybersecurity risk,or undermines the dynamic,innovative global Internet”. Under current US law (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act),companies can send takedown notices to websites,pointing to instances of copyright infringement and get them removed. It was not perfect,but it was granular and as fair as possible. If SOPA goes through,the collateral damage would be tremendous — it would practically destroy all business models around user-generated content,by ceasing payment processing and advertising. What’s more,if YouTube had to personally monitor each video,it wouldn’t be YouTube any more,that vast sea of content uploaded by networked crowds.

If piracy is the bugaboo in the US,it is political dissent in Iran and free speech in India today — and those who seek to fix the problem have fundamentally erred by expecting to impose top-down order on the Internet. Their attempts to track and control all abuse not only places inordinate,unfeasible burdens on service providers,but it will also be hell to enforce. This is not to say that there should be no protection for intellectual property on the Internet or that those injured by hate speech cannot expect redress — but that the solution should not be worse than the problem.