News From The Picket Line
Yesterday’s ‘Net blackout was actually covered by the media, but their articles show that they don’t really understand what the blackout was all about.
Tina at the Agonist featured a USA Today report that had this paragraph as an explanation of the event: “Technology companies staged an online blackout to protest two related bills that would crack down on websites that use copyrighted materials and sell counterfeit goods.”
There are plenty of laws to deal with rogues web sites, but they aren’t apparently enough for the media conglomerates. The basic reason for opposing the laws is that the implementation would cost people a lot of money to break the basic structure of the ‘Net. Technical people tend to oppose doing expensive things that make matters worse.
The BBC had a Viewpoints section with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, Michael O’Leary of the MPAA, and Steve Tepp of the US Chamber of Commerce.
The basic claim from the conglomerates is that they can’t do anything about foreign web sites. That might be more believable if the BBC wasn’t also carrying a story about the Megaupload case. Apparently the US DoJ didn’t have a problem arresting a couple of people in New Zealand and closing a Hong Kong based site, so what is the real purpose of SOPA/PIPA?
If I were of a suspicious mind, I might think it sounds like an opportunity for the media companies to extort money from sites, with a threat to close them down if the money wasn’t forthcoming … but we all know they would never do anything like that ……
January 19, 2012 8 Comments
