Our collective knowledge and understanding of how complex the Internet is made us chuckle a bit this week, when the fight dealing with the overly broad proposals of SOPA and PIPA spilled onto the front pages, television screens, and radio newscasts around the country.
In case you missed it, a group of large companies - primarily large media companies - have been pushing several pieces of legislation this past year in Congress. The supporters of the two biggest bills - SOPA and PIPA - continued insisting right up until Wednesday that both bills only have one main purpose: to prevent copyrighted works from being stolen.
When Wednesday came, however, the old media companies ran into a few hard truths - chief among them, that the old media companies are not as important or as powerful as they've led millions of Americans to believe.
The day of protest online this past Wednesday, by huge Internet entities like Wikipedia, Google, Wordpress, and Mozilla (the company behind the Firefox web browser some of you are using right now), along with an online petition drive that collected over 7 million signatures in a single day, pushed more than a handful of Representatives and Senators to run away from both the SOPA and PIPA bills like the poison they are.
We agree that protecting original online content is important. Paul works hard to draw his cartoons, and we know more than a few other cartoonists, photographers, and other media pros who do the same.
That said, neither of these bills would have truly solved the problem that the big old media companies wanted it to: stopping overseas web users from stealing the content - music, movies, pictures, graphics, and words - of websites based in the U.S. On the contrary, both bills would have made even daily life online nearly impossible.
Under SOPA and PIPA, if your Mom posted the cute video of your neighbor's kid where everyone stands around and sings "Happy Birthday," Warner Brothers - the current owner of the disputed copyright for "Happy Birthday" - would be able to sue the hell out of both you and YouTube, unless you were able to get rid of all copies online. Until you did, you and YouTube would both continue to rack up fines. This drastic threat would be enough to push most people offline altogether, as well as completely shutting down companies like Google and YouTube. Such extremism is exactly why we oppose both bills; we don't feel that either one is salvageable in its current form.
Something good was salvaged from the conflict, however.
According to at least two Capitol Hill sources, many members of Congress actually read both bills for the first time, for themselves, as the protest caught fire Wednesday, of rather than merely taking as gospel the lies the wealthy media companies had been feeding them. After reading the bills, these members realized the potential chilling effect of this legislation - and changed their position on the bills to "oppose" immediately.
If millions of individual Americans joining a protest, while temporarily and voluntarily shutting down large chunks of the Internet, is what it took to get Congress to actually read the legislation and listen to their constituents - instead of listening to the hordes of lobbyists - then we're at least glad our legislative branch finally did their jobs properly.
We can slide into the weekend happy, knowing that - at least on this issue - Congress doesn't appear to be monkeying around anymore.
