Wear the Black: Why Wikipedia is Going Dark

Hopefully, you’ve heard the news about Wikipedia. Today, January 18th, Wikpedia is taking its entire Internet encyclopedia offline in protest of the two Congressional bills worming their way through the festering guts of our crumbling legislative body: the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate. Both bills are backed by major media companies in their never-ending attempt to force you to continue to prop up their failing business models by claiming that untold multitudes of dollars are flying out of their hands due to the activities of online pirates. Of course, none of these companies can prove the numbers they claim to be losing, because one cannot prove something without evidence. However, like Donald Rumsfeld, these companies continue harping on the Internet piracy straw man with the mantra “The absence of evidence is the evidence of absence.”

What’s wrong with these bills, the uninformed might ask? Besides being completely unnecessary in the wake of the awful DMCA laws, or the fact that there already exists sufficient laws on the books making the crimes these bills are meant to stop actually illegal, the bills themselves go entirely too far in their pursuit of “lost revenue.” Boil these bills down to their crystalline centers and you end up with this: these bills would force the shutdown of any provider who transmits content that infringes copyright in ways that stifle any sort of use other than one which pays the copyright holder a fee. That might sound hunky dory until you start to consider the ramifications. Let’s consider a hypothesis.

A 13-year old makes a video of herself singing some inane pop song whose copyright is owned by a major media corporation such as Viacom. That 13-year old posts the video to Youtube for free, makes no revenue off the video and in no way profits other than through potential notoriety (or ridicule as the case may be). Not only is that 13-year old liable for damages to the copyright holder (which by the way most likely won’t be the artist who recorded the song, but the record company they are beholden to and by extension, the major media behemoth that owns said record company), but Youtube if also liable for damages. The media company can force Youtube to remove the video or be shutdown completely. Yes, Youtube can be shut down entirely because a 13-year old recorded a video of someone else’s song but made no money whatsoever off of the video. In addition, the 13-year old’s Internet provider can ALSO be held liable if I’m not mistaken.

Let’s pain this in stark comparison. This is the same as if AT&T was shut down because someone planned a murder over their AT&T phone. Only it isn’t a murder, it’s more like a shoplifting trip to the CD store in which the shoplifter palmed a free promo CD that they then gave away to their little brother.  This is an insane overreaction to a problem that is not nearly so dangerous as the media companies portray. What’s worse is that these gigantic media corporations making billions in revenue a year to shit out derivative crap like Justin Beiber or any of the drivel on American Idol are profiting while the artists who make them their money get next to nothing. Piracy is an issue in the entertainment industry, of that there is no doubt. These bills will not do anything to stop that, but they will damage the Internet if taken to their extreme. And if it’s one thing major media companies know how to do, it’s go to the extremes to protect their revenue stream. These are people who sue grandmothers for millions because their 13-year old downloaded an MP3. Do you really think they’d use this power with the proper restraint?

January 18, 2012 at 3:04 pm | Politics | No comment

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