The average Internet-savvy Canadian must have felt ill-at-ease for at least a few hours this January.
The aspiring vendor selling his unwanted furniture could not check for new requests on Craigslist.
Those who frequently use the Internet for recreation – such as viewing funny pictures of cats – actually had to go outside, as cat-happy photo sites like Reddit, icanhascheezburger and Imgur were down.
Most famously, Wikipedia’s 24-hour shutdown interrupted users’ habit of skimming articles in conveniently condensed form.
These sites are among the roughly 7,000 websites that participated in protests against proposed U.S. copyright laws on Jan. 18, in addition to several sites whose home pages promoted links to petitions against the legislation, including the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), and Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (the PROTECT IP Act, also known as PIPA).
For anyone who knows the difference between WordPress and a printing press, the blackouts ranged from inconvenient to plain frustrating.
Good. They should have been.
The common Canadian complaint over the protests is a matter of relevance; SOPA and PIPA is American legilsation, so why should cyberspace-hungry Canadians be punished?
Because Canadian users felt the sting of the blackout of American sites (although some Canadian websites, such as the Canadian Press, joined the protests as well). And the blackout phenomenon wasn’t a punishment so much as a wake-up call.
These potential American laws would affect Canada due to the intersection between our culture and entertainment, especially online.
Moreover, American laws often set the standard for copyright legislation internationally. It’s likely some of the problems with SOPA and PIPA will make their way into Canadian laws such as Bill C-11, Canada’s latest effort at intellectual property protection.
These reasons should convince Canadians to start protesting alongside our neighbours.
What the SOPA/PIPA protests aimed to prove was a potential consequence of these bills.
Yet as much as the protests demonized them, the bills did set out with pure enough intentions. SOPA and PIPA are attempts to block “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods,” according to a May 2011 draft of PIPA. In other words, this is an attempt to increase the U.S.’s ammunition against online piracy.
The government could more actively interfere with illegally copied movies, music and TV shows, although in the process they may not be punishing the real pirates. For example, if a user submits a pirated link to Wikipedia, the government would shut down the entire website rather than persecute the individual users.
The introduction of a pair of bills like these right now is no surprise; digital intellectual property laws have a high turnover rate due to the constantly changing nature of technologies and cyberspace.
A copyright cookbook becomes outdated almost as quickly as a government can stamp its approval.
For the past decade or so, the U.S. has mostly operated under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 copyright law that criminalized the act of linking to copyrighted material.
What has been nagging the U.S. government, despite popular critical opinion, is that it cannot control everything. The DMCA failed to recognize the emerging globalization of the Internet and digital media, and has since become outdated.
This irks ultra-conservative American copyright crusaders, who can do nothing but kick up dust in response to the popularity of foreign-owned distributors of pirated material, like Swedish website The Pirate Bay.
Debate over the intricacies of copyright law considers if online piracy is actually devil’s spawn; on the one hand, each download of pirated material could mean one less album or DVD sale, yet on the other hand, does watching one 22-minute TV show on YouTube mean one less sale of a full TV series box set? Regardless, these are questions that we should be asking – “we” as in everyone, Canadians included. Copyright law should be reviewed frequently and considered carefully.
Here is where the protests against SOPA and PIPA come in. As necessary as SOPA/PIPA’s intentions were, the execution was as poor as a shaky camcorder recording in a movie theatre.
Though the U.S. cannot tell a foreign website what to do, SOPA and PIPA try to circumvent this. They suggest blocking foreign pirates by using a court order on American search engines like Google to scorch the offending website by deleting hyperlinks to the site or redirecting traffic away from it.
If these bills target a website, the site can be shut down almost immediately and without due process, unlike the current DMCA. Even websites that heavily depend on user-generated content-sharing – such as Facebook or Reddit – could shut down if someone posts pirated material, even if the website’s moderators are not directly responsible for it.
Canadians, if I don’t have your attention yet, there’s more.
SOPA treats all .com or .org domains as domestic domain names under U.S. law. But even if Canadian cyberspace escapes unscathed from the bills, oftentimes American copyright law sets the precedent for proposed legislation in other countries. It happened in Canada with the DMCA and it could happen again.
This is where we step in. Let’s use this opportunity to evaluate not just this, but all copyright discourse.
Domestically, we can reopen the debate over Bill C-11 and digital locks, which are software that can prevent people from legally making personal copies of material we own.
Canadians can continue the momentum of the protests by shaking our stereotype of politeness and making a fuss. The future freedom of funny cat pictures may depend on us.