Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (60 page)

Proposals to use the power of the government to discredit and marginalize those who use the Internet to disseminate information are not the only threat to Internet freedom. Some of the biggest threats come in the form of legislation ostensibly designed to protect intellectual property rights or thwart cyberterrorism.

In 2012 Congress considered two such measures, namely the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). SOPA allegedly was justified by the need to stop intentional piracy of intellectual property such as movies and videos. This bill achieved its goal by forcing website owners to act as government agents and allowing the government—oftentimes at the behest of politically-powerful corporations—to shut down entire websites if merely one single user was found to have improperly posted copyrighted material. Thus, the millions of Americans who use sites like Facebook or YouTube could have been denied access to these sites because someone, perhaps inadvertently, posted a film clip in violation of a copyright.

The potential for abuse of this power is obvious. Regardless of where one stands on the question of whether protecting intellectual property is a legitimate function of the government, I am sure everyone agrees that the federal government should abide by the constitutional limits on federal power and not disregard or abuse the First and Fourth Amendments.

Fortunately, grassroots activists, aided by Internet companies who would be affected by SOPA, organized one of the largest campaigns opposing a bill that I have ever seen in my time in office. Congressional offices were buried under a sea of angry emails and phone calls, and the legislation was pulled from the congressional calendar.

Unfortunately, a few months after the victory over SOPA, the House passed CISPA. CISPA gave the federal government new powers to monitor online communications without a warrant as long as the monitoring was done in the name of “cyber security.” Unfortunately, many of the same corporations who opposed SOPA favored CISPA. Why? In large part they supported the bill because it provided them protections from being held accountable when they violate their consumer’s privacy at the behest of the government. So while Internet activists could influence the political process to prevent SOPA, CISPA demonstrated that corporatism and lobbying still rule Washington D.C.

As of this writing, it appears that the House and Senate will not agree on a final version of CISPA this year. However, the Obama administration seems ready to impose provision of this bill by executive order.

Another threat to Internet freedom is the possibility that freedom of expression may be curtailed in the name of cracking down on “hate speech” or pornography. This is a very dangerous mentality, shared by many on both the political right and left who alternatively seek to legislate morality or enforce political correctness with force. But I believe giving the government power to censor any form of government speech will lead to censorship of all forms of speech. Therefore we cannot allow our strong moral objections to pornography or speech that degrades other human beings to serve as justification for government censorship of any form of Internet speech.

Supporters of Internet freedom must also engage in the battle to restore the right of adults to gamble on the Internet. Like all forms of prohibition, the ban on Internet gambling will not succeed in preventing gambling. Instead such a ban simply ensures that organized crime or offshore operations fill the void and run online gambling businesses. Rest assured that the supposed need to protect gamblers from themselves will be used to justify ever more stringent police state controls on everyone’s Internet activity.

The past five years have seen an explosion in the liberty movement, fueled in large part by the Internet. Preserving that freedom is crucial if the liberty movement is to continue its progress. Therefore, all activists in the liberty movement have a stake in the battle for Internet freedom. We must be ready to come together to fight any attempt to increase government’s power over the Internet, regardless of the supposed justifications. Copyright protection, pornography, “conspiracy theories,” gambling, and “hate speech” are merely excuses for doing what all governments have done throughout human history: increase their size, scope, and power.

My organization, Campaign for Liberty, is going to make Internet freedom a key issue in its grassroots efforts over the next several years. I hope those who realize the critical importance of Internet freedom will consider joining Campaign for Liberty and taking up the battle against government control over the free flow of online information.

After eight records, three EPs, and 12 years of touring the globe non-stop, Erin McKeown is just getting warmed up. Over the last decade, Erin has spent an average of two hundred nights onstage each year. She has appeared on
Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Later with Jools Holland, NPR,
BBC, and has had her music placed in numerous films, television shows, and commercials. In the last several years, McKeown has launched a successful side-career as a political activist, lobbying regularly on Capitol Hill in an effort to connect the worlds of policy, music, and technology. Her anti-SOPA video may be viewed here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da-XkA6746U

As a songwriter, I get asked all the time, “which comes first, the words or the music?” In twenty plus years of writing, I’ve never found a predictable pattern in my creativity. My friends who are also writers say the same. You never know, until you just know. You constantly labor, trying out many ideas, and then, there comes a moment when the ideas stick together and become inextricable. Something ignites, and a song comes into being. It is a singular thrill.

I think the defeat of SOPA/PIPA was a similar, singular moment when the many strands of Internet culture (the geeks, the critics, the creators, the users) all lifted their heads out of their respective sandboxes, became inextricable, and spoke with a unified voice: “NO.” I’ll go ahead and say it: the defeat of SOPA/ PIPA was a moment when the words and the music arrived at the same time, and you just knew. It was absolutely thrilling to be a part of.

Now, post-thrill and pre-next battle, I would like to make a case for digital activism by artists.

When I started my career in the late ’90s, I kept my political self separate from my musical self. I feared writing terrible, un-musical work that was bogged down with a message. I was trying to connect to the more established music industry, and I feared alienating anyone in my search for the widest possible audience.

However, as time went on and I became less and less concerned with participating in a music business that was rapidly crumbling anyway, I began to narrow that gap between my political self and my musical self. It was tiring to maintain, and I was burnt out on the ego-centric business of promoting myself constantly. There had to be a better reason to be a musician than just talking about yourself all the time.

I began by practicing the vocabulary of activism. Could I simply talk about what I believed? I remember being on Rachel Maddow’s radio show in the mid 2000s and trying to desperately to keep up with her as she articulated her views on issues and policies I cared about as well.

“I’ve got to get better at this,” I thought.

I looked to other artists whose political work I admired, and I learned by watching their skills. Slowly I gained confidence; I began to find my own voice; and I began to move toward actions.

For a long time, it’s been a cliché about artists that we don’t know what’s going on beyond whatever drug or show is right in front of us. Sometimes this cliché has had truth behind it. Sometimes artists have been willing participants in a tacit agreement to leave the art to the artist and the business to the business owners.

But sometimes artists have been unwilling participants in this agreement too, forced by all kinds of pressures to agree to contracts and situations that keep people with money and power rolling in their own, continued money and power. And there are a great many artists who take enormous pride in paying attention to what is happening around them and to them. Some of us refuse to shut up and sing. It is my experience that the more you engage with the world around you, the better your art is for it.

Here’s this word again: inextricable. As an artist, I find I am inextricable from the Internet. It is my instrument, my storefront, my megaphone, my audience, and my distributor. Thus I have found it is also the perfect arena for my activist self. It is a pipeline to get at the social justice work that matters most to me: access, participation, finding solutions to structural inequalities. As a visual / textual / auditory medium, it’s right in my wheelhouse as a creator. In my activism, I get to play with the Internet.

Artists are uniquely built for this sort of thing. This is what we do. The Internet is both our cause and the toolbox to fight for it.

So much gets said about how the Internet offers endless freedom for the artist. There is a mistaken belief that somehow, left to its own devices, the Internet levels the playing field between the haves and the have nots. Another myth: In the paradise of infinite storage, there is infinite attention to be paid even the smallest artist. Yet, it’s been my experience that the Internet is still subject to the same pressures as any other venue for expression. People with money and power will always want to keep their money and power.

However, for the artist the Internet does offer a pathway to change in that it is not done growing; it is not done evolving; and in its growth spurts, artists do have a unique opportunity to disrupt and push back at some of the usual suspects.

One of the main victories of the fight against SOPA/PIPA was the realization by many artists that they are also copyright holders, and that the Internet offers them an opportunity to exercise these rights however they choose. The work around SOPA/PIPA showed the world that copyright holders are not necessarily large media companies.

Instead, copyright holders are a diverse group that will not all make the same decisions on how to manage their rights.

Many artists understood, perhaps for the first time, that being a copyright holder doesn’t mean you want to or have to wall your art off and make people pay for entry. It simply means you are the one that gets to make the choice about
what you want to do with your art. There is a vast world between “sue your pants off” and “everything is free.”

Lest we lapse into too much self-congratulation, there is much work to do. I have no doubt that the folks that brought forth SOPA/PIPA will try once again to restrict Internet freedom in order to maintain their own profit margins. As artists, we must speak to each other about this way of framing the rights of creators. It is a pathway to increased creativity, collaboration, and income. It is my personal mission to recruit more and more artists for this fight. And we will make you look and listen to our activism in ways that will be thoughtful, playful, artistic, and engaged. Words and music, inextricable.

Brad Burnham is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, an investment firm based out of New York City. Before USV, Burnham began work for AT&T in 1979 and oversaw a number of successful mergers and investments. As an active member of the information technology community, Burnham used his knowledge to fight against the passage of SOPA and PIPA. He made appearances on TV talk shows, Internet media, and social forums where he advocated against the bills. Burnham currently serves on the boards of a number of popular social media and networking sites, such as Tumblr, Stack Exchange, and others. This essay is adapted from a talk he gave at the Center for Democracy and Technology
.

I started working in technology 30 years ago and for most of that time thought that the work I did had very little to do with policy. Back then, I was either building or investing in the technology infrastructure that became the foundation for the Internet. In the last several years, however, the investment opportunity has shifted from infrastructure to the applications and services that ride on top of that infrastructure. All of a sudden, every policy decision made in Washington impacts our work. Many impinge on what I believe is a core freedom: the freedom to innovate.