Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (9 page)

We posted a special “Tease of the Day” which featured the gorgeous Arabella Suicide in a set of photographs entitled “Pirate Girl.” Despite the fact that pertinent parts of her anatomy had been redacted with black bars that bore the words “STOP SOPA!” in large pink Helvetica type, it remains to this day one of the most re-tweeted items on our blog. Similarly, other posts explaining the problems with SOPA and covering the deafening #J18 silence count among our most read and shared posts. We also had fun with self-censored tweets containing messages such as “Stop #SOPA Now!!! … Before it
to your Internet.”

Wikipedia going dark on January 18 in protest of SOPA and PIPA made the story unavoidable for the mainstream media, but it was volunteer moderators of the most popular subreddits who first advocated for the blackout. Enough moderators agreed to go dark, that the administrative team at reddit announced an overall blackout of the site. They would replace the stream of popular links and discussions with calls to action on how to stop SOPA.

It was a movement indeed. Anonymous redditors pushed reddit into being the first of thousands of sites, including Wikipedia and Google, to take action on that fateful day. Similarly, another redditor suggested a boycott of GoDaddy, which supported the bills for long enough to feel the wrath of a coordinated domain transfer away from their service before relenting and apologizing for backing the legislation. As people called their senators and representatives to argue their position, they shared their stories online, encouraging others to do the same.

On January 18th 2012 the New York Tech Meetup took the lead, as Demand Progress, and allied groups buttressed their efforts to organize an anti-SOPA rally outside of the midtown tower that houses [Chuck Schumer’s] office. We’d concentrate the movement’s focus on the office of this powerful senator, and provide the press with a 3D spectacle that would serve as an accessible representation of the otherwise abstract online activism. Even the likes of Congressman Mike Quigley’s staffers—who literally didn’t believe how many emails they were receiving—would be forced to contend with the concept that there are, indeed, real, live people who care about these issues.
The New Yorker
’s write-up affectionately (and accurately) called it a “Nerd Parade.”

The effect was immediately felt. That morning, countless members of Congress took to their websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds to announce their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. In the Senate, freshmen Republicans were among the first to announce their opposition, including Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and Marco Rubio of Florida, a key PIPA co-sponsor. Though new opposition that day was overwhelming, there seemed to be a Republican tilt to the early
announcements. By 3 p.m., twenty-six of the twenty-nine new opponents of the bills were Republicans

The police extended the barriers away from the stage, so they now ran the whole length of the block. Ten minutes later we’d taken over two lanes of midtown, noontime traffic in addition to half of the sidewalk. Then so many people filled the sidewalk that all the police could do was to keep a clear walkway as wide as a couple of concrete panels: there were more than two thousand of us.

The crowd didn’t quite know what to do: it was easy to catch ambient exclamations along the lines of “this is the first time I’ve ever really protested anything!” These weren’t veteran activists, and nobody had yet invented whatever chants one’s supposed to recite at an Internet rally: this was something new.

First the Republican senators pulled out. Then the White House issued a statement opposing the bill. Then the Democrats, left all alone, announced they were pulling the bill so they could have a few further discussions before the vote.

On January 18th, the Stop SOPA blackout occurred. An estimated seventy-five thousand websites went black in protest. I had my Congressional Web site go dark. Over one hundred sixty-two million people were said to have viewed Wikipedia’s blacked out page. Google put a notice on its famous front page, with a click-through to scholarly analyses of the measures and an easy way to contact Members of Congress. The phone calls started to flood into Capitol Hill offices. All told, an estimated eight million Americans called their representatives and senators to voice their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. The phone meltdown had arrived.

Wikipedia went black. Reddit went black. Craigslist went black. The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat-out melted. Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill. It was just ridiculous.

There’s a chart from that time that captures it quite well. It says something like:

January 14 and then it has this big long list of names supporting the bill, and just a handful of lonely ones opposing it.

And then: January 15. And suddenly it’s totally reversed—everyone is opposing, with just a few lonely people left in support.

By the time January 18th rolled around, even the most dedicated protectors of the MPAA and RIAA scurried away from SOPA and PIPA. I recall warning one staffer weeks before the blackout that the MPAA and RIAA had completely lost the public debate and it would be a really bad idea politically to move forward.
The Internet Blackout made it crystal clear to all in Congress that a vote for one of these bills would be political suicide.

By January 23rd, the bills were officially killed when Chairman Lamar Smith announced the indefinite delay of the SOPA markup and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) pulled PIPA from the agenda in the Senate.

We killed the bill dead. So dead that when members of Congress propose something that even touches the Internet, they give a long speech beforehand about how it is definitely not at all like SOPA. So dead that when you ask Congressional staffers about it, they groan and shake their heads, like it’s all a bad dream they’re trying hard to forget. So dead, that it’s hard to believe this story.

In the post-SOPA spin cycle, some in the media were keen to paint this as a pitched battle between big content and big tech. The corporate entertainment industry was happy to play along, painting a conspiratorial picture of the protests. This was far from the case. First, the entertainment industry had quite a head start in terms of lobbying, having already poured millions of dollars into Washington before most of the tech companies even showed up. Second, the opposition to SOPA (and to a lesser extent, PIPA) was diverse, diffuse, and powered from the bottom-up.

Hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing. Hard to remember how it could have been any other way.

First, SOPA and PIPA’s opponents were united. The fact that all the technical experts and engineers who weighed in opposed the bills was weighed heavily. Second, we marshaled detailed arguments. Using that technical background to our advantage, we were able to present a detailed case for why SOPA and PIPA broke the Internet, laying out networking and cyber security concerns that were not initially obvious. Opponents were more communicative and open—something also seen in the media—and proponents more circumspect and reluctant. Finally, we knew who our targets were.

Congressmen will always be dependent upon their funders. That’s human nature. But we can change who their funders are. Rather than a tiny fraction of the 1%, we could create a system in which we all are the effective funders of political
campaigns—whether a system of public funding, like most other mature democracies, or a system of “citizen funding,” where all citizens, but only citizens, contribute to the funding of campaigns. Imagine, for example, that every citizen had a $50 democracy voucher that she could give to any candidate who agreed to fund his or her campaign with vouchers plus contributions limited to $100. That system would produce an economy of influence radically different from the one we have today.

In many ways, the goal of intellectual property enforcement could be made easier by taking a hard look at how music and other creative content is licensed. What we want are more legal services that compensate artists and where fans can find the music they love. This will require figuring out how to more quickly and efficiently get large catalogs of music from service to user.

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.

An independent Government Accountability Office report in April 2010 showed that no reliable evidence or statistics exist to support the extreme claims of the entertainment industry of about $20 billion in losses from online copyright infringement. The entertainment industry has actually thrived over the last decade and is not suffering from Internet abuse, as is sometimes claimed.

The striking fact about the SOPA/PIPA victory was that it was essentially cross-partisan. It was the Cato Institute as well as Demand Progress. It was net business as well as Wikipedia. There was no Left/Right valence to the fight against this Internet censorship. There was instead a brilliant campaign that succeeded in neutralizing those differences enough to allow all of us to focus on our common enemy.

That in itself was an amazing victory. And if we learn anything from the SOPA/PIPA fight, we should learn how to do that again.

It wasn’t a dream, or a nightmare. It was all very real. And it will happen again. Sure, it will have a different name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake. The enemies of the
freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politicians’ eyes has not been put out.

Right now, it takes little more than a few key phrases—“open,” “censorship,” “privacy,” “break the Internet”—to hook the outrage of the Internet masses. But maintaining momentum requires something more sophisticated. And the accusations have to prove true. To become a permanent counterbalance to traditional governments, the bitroots movement will need to become more nuanced and more proactive. To avoid the very real possibility of mob rule, Internet activists must use their power responsibly. SOPA was a gimme.

What we saw in SOPA and PIPA was an attempt to make Internet policy from a narrow perspective, with little if any input from the community of people who best understand and care about how the Internet actually works. One of the key reasons we were successful in defeating these bills was that the community spoke up anyway. Millions of Internet users all over the country—indeed, all over the world—demanded that their concerns be heard. Imagine how much better Internet policymaking could work in the future if the public—and the experts—are included in the discussion from the start.

My main disagreement with the current state of the copyright debate is that the political balance is tilted too much in favor of content owners to the detriment of Internet innovation. Hollywood and the United States seem to be picking and choosing who they like and don’t like and that does not provide for the fairness, due process, and predictability that dual use technology companies like Megaupload need to grow and thrive. I believe it would be better for society to allow breathing room for Internet innovation. This case is at its core not about a criminal issue but rather an economics and political debate that is better suited to be dealt with in Congress.

There are a lot of powerful people who want to clamp down on the Internet. And, to be honest, there aren’t a whole lot who have a vested interest in protecting it. Even some of the biggest Internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit from a world in which their little competitors could be censored. We can’t let that happen.