Web 2.0 Goes to Washington: Part 1

When I woke up on the morning of January 18^th, I did not know I was going to participate in a great American tradition. I was about to join a long line of protestors, beginning with the Boston Tea Party and the Continental Congress through the Civil Rights protestors and even the Occupy Wall Street movement.

At the time, two bills supported by a majority of senators and representatives were making their way through Congress, one titled "The Stop Online Piracy Act," or SOPA, and the other "The Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011," or PIPA. On January 18^th, millions of Americans signed petitions or wrote to Congress and the White House, asking them to change their minds about SOPA and PIPA-and they did. While these bills had the laudable goal of defeating online piracy, they were ultimately defeated because they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of online communication.

The two bills and the Jan. 18^th protests neatly combined two issues that have recently intrigued communications researchers: first, the meaning of piracy and the function of copyright in modern, Internet-based dialogs and second, the impact of the internet on political discussions in a modern democracy. Today, I'd like to discuss the first of those two issues: the nature and role of copyright, and whether it is adequate for today's communication styles.

The Problem of Piracy and the Problem with PIPA/SOPA

The two bills that spent a day being so controversial were intended to suppress online piracy, which is the practice of distributing copyrighted media content without the copyright holder's permission. This is mainly accomplished through peer-to-peer networks but also happens on social media sites such as Youtube. Because pirates create copies without the permission of the item's owner, and certainly are not paying for this privilege or informing the owner of their activities, they are breaking copyright law, which grants to the author or creator of a book, play, or other item the exclusive ability to make and distribute copies of their work. In many cases, authors sell their copyright privileges to publishing houses, production companies, or other distributors in exchange for a one-time payment or a share in any profits that result from the release of their creative work.

Lobbyists representing large, traditional media corporations and movie studios had worked industriously to recruit senators and representatives to vote in favor of PIPA and SOPA, and the bills were expected to proceed through both chambers smoothly. If they had passed, these media corporations would have been given power to not just sue alleged pirates, but also to enlist the government to remove revenue sources from websites associated with pirating, to prevent search traffic from discovering such websites, and even to destroy the website's web address.

These broad powers of policing would most likely have greatly redacted the amount and fundamentally changed the kind of conversation on the Internet. Who would want to use a picture, embed a video, or email a song when you might be sued, have your income curtailed, and your web address shut down? Lawyers call this a "chilling effect," and the Supreme Court has worked very hard in the last two hundred years to make sure that no industry or group-including the government-is in a position to have a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech.

Fig.1: stopthewall.us on Jan. 18^th. Some people would call this hyperbolic, but many Americans feared it would become chillingly accurate if PIPA and SOPA passed.

Social Media's New Communication Patterns

The communication that occurs on the Internet today is mostly carried on using very few modes. Email is still wildly popular and is used across generations, but recently Web 2.0 technologies, otherwise known as social media, have come to dominate many peoples' Internet habits, especially those of young adults and teens. Examples of this include Facebook and Twitter and Youtube, but blogs also count-anything that enables users to not only discuss but also add content, or take content to be used elsewhere, could be considered a Web 2.0 technology.

Scholar Michele Jackson points out that although new gadgets and interfaces have radically altered the level, content, and frequency of our communication, our basic model of communication is still "conceptualized in the traditional manner, as transmission," (409) or a flow from transmitter to receiver, speaker to listener. However, this does not correspond to the realities of modern, internet-based communication. "The first definition of mobility-mobility 1.0-concerns building out a network; that is, connecting components of a system" (Jackson 409). Increasingly, this network building disconnects information from its original context, and users then reconnect these pieces of information to each other whether or not they are aware of the original context.

In Jackson's description of modern, internet-based communication, "the removal of information from its particular context is the essential property of mobility 2.0. Information does not so much travel from one place to another, as much as it exists in a fluid state, able to flow freely and to be appreciated simultaneously in multiple and undetermined ways" (Jackson 409). The PIPA/SOPA protests were an example of this. The information about the bills had been publicly posted on Congress' website, but when Google and Wikipedia blacked out their pages and provided links to sign protest letters, they did not also link to the original text of the bill on the Library of Congress's website. Instead, they linked to summaries written by other Internet-based groups. The information was accurate, but it had been removed from its context in the body of the entire bill and the Congress's discussion, and it was flowing freely around the Internet as people signed and commented and spread the word.

Fig. 2: The flood of tweets on Jan. 18^th with the tag "#Stop SOPA and PIPA"

Copyright Designed for Old Communication Patterns

Copyright law does not allow for this fluid transfer of information and does not reflect the communication practices of our contemporary society. Copyright was designed for the physical, analog world and a model of communication in which messages go from speaker to listener and then stop.

In keeping with this model, it could be argued that anyone who passed on a chain email without first ascertaining that the cute puppy video or the gorgeous jungle picture was in the public domain broke copyright, because forwarding that email causes a new copy of that video or image to be made. Social media technologies embrace these activities, distributing images and videos and websites as quickly as the flu virus and sometimes driving traffic and revenue streams away from the copyright holder, be it the original creator or a distribution company.

SOPA and PIPA would have become a weapon to redirect these streams, but only by giving the copyright holders and the government excessive regulatory and punitive powers. Individuals would have had to fear not only a lawsuit but also being blocked from search results and denied ad revenue or being shut down completely if they put a toe out of line. The doctrine of fair use, which allows limited use of copyrighted materials for critique, satire, and classroom education, might have provided some protection to some web users, but the onus, the burden, would have been on the web user, not the copyright holder, to make sure no laws were being broken. That is not the American way; the burden of proof is on the prosecutor, not the defendant.

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Jackson, Michele H. "Fluidity, Promiscuity, and Mash-Ups: New Concepts for the Study of Mobility and Communication." Communication Monographs 74.3 (2007): 408-413. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 9 Feb. 2012.