SOPA, PIPA, and Democracy

I’m sure that by now, everybody has now at least heard of the SOPA/PIPA bills that have been stirring up the hornets’ nest of the Internet.  And my, what a hornets’ nest indeed!  While most online activism has been confined to changing Facebook profile pictures, signing online petitions, and writing angry blogs, this latest controversy has managed to stir up almost everybody who has any real connection to the Internet—most notably, the actual companies that own, manage, and regulate the Internet.

The flaws in the legislation are fairly straightforward; the bills would allow angry companies, like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), to act through the state to create a blacklist of websites which allegedly facilitate, aid, and abet piracy.  As Evan Hansen of Wired.com writes:

“Under the current wording of the measures, the Attorney General would have the power to order ISPs to block access to foreign-based sites suspected of trafficking in pirated and counterfeit goods; order search engines to delist the sites from their indexes; ban advertising on suspected sites; and block payment services from processing transactions for accused sites. If the same standards were applied to U.S.-based sites, Wikipedia, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Google and Wired could all find themselves blocked.

Such requests would need to be reviewed and approved by a judge. But accused sites would get little notice of a pending action in U.S. courts against them, and, once blacklisted, have little effective means of appeal.”

Judging from the fact that over 7,000 websites enacted some form of self-censorship as protest on Wednesday, and millions upon millions of citizens signed anti-SOPA/PIPA petitions throughout that day, it is clear that most of the Internet agrees:  SOPA and PIPA are two very, very bad pieces of legislation.  And the outcry has had clear results; at least 10 Senators have withdrawn their support for the bills, and the controversy within Congress itself has reached a record high.

But what do the events of the yesterday, and the struggle against Internet censorship as a whole, mean?

Many individuals are cheering the struggle as being an example of true democracy rearing its head; millions of citizens, acting to make their voices heard, and defeating a poorly-conceived law.  But the fact remains that the source of such terrible legislation remains:  the United States Congress, a body filled with people either incompetent, corrupt, or both (usually both).  And considering the large amount of campaign donations and support—also known as bribery—from the movie and music industry to various members of Congress, is it any surprise that Democrats and Republicans were able to put aside their ‘differences’ that usually block any meaningful legislation from being passed, in order to create bipartisan support for a bill that would protect two dying, obsolete industries from the innovative power of the Internet?  It is almost a given that some form of SOPA and PIPA will come about again in the near future, tucked away in some appropriations bill or passed through some underhanded procedural tactic.

I think Mr. Madox summarizes this sentiment in a very eloquent and hilariously obscene way:

“[SOPA] is a shitty piece of legislation put together by puppetmaster lobbyists and politician puppets who don’t know IP addresses from their assholes. My problem with this huge online protest against SOPA, and the reason I rarely take part in such protests, is because it doesn’t address any problems, only the symptom. The problem isn’t this shitty bill, it’s the people who sponsored it. So we protest this bill today, bang enough pots and pans to shame a few backers into not letting this bill pass, then what? Those same dipshits who wrote this legislation still have jobs. They’re going to try again, and again, and again until some mutation of this legislation passes. They’ll sneak it into an appropriation bill while nobody’s looking during recess, because there’s too much lobbyist money at stake for them not to. We defeat SOPA today, only to face it again tomorrow. It’s like trying to stop a cold by blowing your nose. It’s time we go after the virus.

There have been many bills attempted (and some passed) like SOPA before it. There’s the DMCA act of 1998, PRO-IP Act of 2008, the 2011 Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and now the PROTECT IP Act of 2012. Think this victory means anything? A new bill gets introduced every year or two like clockwork. Check back in a few years, and there’ll be another SOPA or Protect IP Act being squeezed down the lower intestinal tracts of congress. And then what? We black out our websites again like a merry band of idiots?

Well said, Mr. Madox.  And while I am inclined to give the SOPA/PIPA protests and day of action more credit than he is, I think that his central thesis is extremely important to understand:  that these bills are not random, source-less entities.  They were a product of a broken system, and until that system is fixed—or destroyed—we will continue to see terrible pieces of legislation that stifle the economy, curtail civil rights, and further strangle our dying democracy.