You bastards, you killed the internet
The Internet and free information is a marriage perplexed by the nature and strains of its own union. This past year we have witnessed the rise of a revolution, peered into the horrors of government policy, and have united as a general populace on key political issues; all due to free information. Driving a friend to the airport in Bellingham, I asked if he could describe the highs and lows of 2011 in 11 concise points. His response was that it would be impossible to say what the high points have been, since what the world witnessed was only a glimpse of events yet to come. The world hasn’t had time to digest. The irony, he continued, is that we live in a time when a man can peer behind the curtain of political power and give the public information that reveals corruption; yet, he is labeled as a criminal and terrorist.
The media has been flooded with news about controversial proposed laws such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), but little information has been presented about the Canadian equivalent, Bill C-11. First off, it is important to highlight what these proposed laws mean, and the significance of their tangible impact upon our quality of daily life in a democratic society.
Photo Credit: Mathew Braun
Let us be clear, the United States Congress have simply postponed making a decision on SOPA and PIPA, they have not gone away. They are still to be voted for or against, and the outcome remains unclear.
So why should we care? It sounds great on paper, and it is completely understandable that the members of our parliament would sign off on ACTA, and why acts such as SOPA and PIPA are being discussed in U.S. congress. After all, online piracy negatively affects businesses and would therefore seem detrimental to the economy. At a glance, it makes sense. Generally, we all agree that stealing is wrong, and the intellectual property lost in online piracy should be constituted as theft.
The concern comes with consideration to the terminology. Intellectual property is defined as “property (as an idea, invention or process) that derives from the work or the mind of an intellect.” This could be a song, a recipe, an academic paper, or an article. It could be anything that comes from the “mind of an intellect,” which means that it really could be anything. Throughout our university careers, we are constantly consulting arguments and ideas that are not our own. We are beings fueled by inspiration, and what we create is a result of what has inspired us. To that end, nothing that we do is completely original because we have based it off of something else. If this is the case, then what does intellectual property cover?
It is a far reach, but consider the term “War on Terror.” What does it mean? Terror is a relational term—one individual’s impact upon another person or group of people—with too few constraints upon its applicable reach. This term has brought Canadians and Americans to Iraq, uprooted ruthless dictatorships, and reopened Guantanamo Bay.
So what does this have to do with intellectual property? The point is that the semantics of such relational terms are unconstrained, and have historically been abused for the monetary gain and perpetuation of a political agenda. We also have to consider what piracy is. Is it stealing or is it sharing, or are these terms interchangeable? Many wouldn’t think twice about purchasing a movie and watching it with a group of friends. This seems reasonable, but according to the terminology in these proposals, this is in fact piracy. You are facilitating in an exchange of intellectual property that others have not paid for. What about a book? Is it reasonable to borrow or give a novel away when you are done reading it? According to ACTA, it is not. The reuse would constitute copyright infringement and be punishable as a criminal act.
These proposals blur the lines of what is sharable, and what is piracy. Websites such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube have the potential to be labeled as venues for copyright infringement. Already we see videos being removed from Youtube because of copyright laws. Twitter is a platform for users to share intellectual property, re-tweet thoughts and upload them onto other social media sites. It is also a way of sharing news as it happens. We witnessed this first hand with the rise of the Arab Spring. It is not far off to say that such revolutions may not have occurred with laws that enabled the suppression of easily dispensed and shared information. Wikipedia is the epitome of free information, and would drastically change how students access educational material if it were to disappear.
So how is this relevant to Canadians? University of Ottawa’s Dr. Michael Geist recently pointed out that Canadian IP addresses will be subject to the U.S. law, since IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national ones. The entity that controls and monitors Canada’s, as well as 20 Caribbean nations’, IP addresses is located in the U.S., and these bills treat all IP addresses of a region as domestic property of the country to which they are allocated. This is, to put it mildly, a huge threat to Canadian sovereignty. Also, the upcoming Canadian Bill C-11 is similar to these proposals on many levels, and the assumption is that since SOPA and PIPA have been placed on hold stateside, efforts will be made to export them to other countries.
If you are concerned by this, write to your MP. If you are American, write to your congressman. The protection and use of information is a determining factor for the direction of our economy, academy, and policy. You have a stake in this.
What You Should Know:
ACTA is a multinational agreement with the purpose of establishing an international standard on how to govern and enforce intellectual property rights. Its aim is to create an international legal framework targeting counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet, AKA online piracy. ACTA’s aim is to create a new governing body that is separate from the World Trade Organization and the United Nations, in order to target this growing issue. 31 countries, including Canada, the United States, and a large portion of the European Union, signed the agreement on October 1, 2011.
SOPA is a United States bill which aims to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to combat online trafficking of copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods. It would have the ability to bar advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and would inhibit search engines from linking to such sites. It would also permit court ordered warrants requiring Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) to block access to these types of web sites, and would impose a maximum penalty of five years in prison for an individual who downloads or streams copyrighted content through their Internet connection.
PIPA is similar to SOPA, in that its proclaimed aim is to combat online piracy, but the way in which it affects individual users is unique. PIPA allows itself the ability to bar a user from accessing the Internet, as well as shut down individual websites that facilitate piracy or websites that link to them. To quote directly, PIPA states that an “information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures… to remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order.” Search engines such as Google would be required to disable access to infringing websites, or be subject to legal scrutiny.
Mathew Braun
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