However the MPAA and much of Hollywood’s old guard remained defiant. Their refusal to understand the new paradigm, and their determination to wage war against their greatest consumers—and turn their customers into a criminal class—merely serves to underline how out of touch they are with their future sales base. Meanwhile their actions ironically alienate many of the outlets that promote their wares (as ours does with entertainment-based columns, reviews, and interviews). In a statement and via multiple (and quite absurd) tweets, the MPAA explained/excused their pro-SOPA stance by blaming “foreign criminals,” claiming that they were taking action to defend “American jobs”—an argument that doesn’t really hold up when you consider research which indicates the biggest sharers of copyrighted material are also the biggest consumers.
Though many of the politicians that support SOPA, and the corporations that bought them, remain unrepentant, the unprecedented day of online action thrust the issue of Internet freedom to the fore, educating many who were previously unaware of the bills and forcing the mainstream media—however unwillingly—to report a little of the Orwellian reality that laws like SOPA and PIPA would bring.
But the fight is far from over. Though #SOPA and its supporters made a hasty retreat, many of the provisions are rearing their ugly heads in a seemingly endless barrage of new SOPA-like Return of SOPA / Son of SOPA legislation. However this time the online massive is ready for the onslaught of those who purport to represent us but in reality kowtow to lobbyists and serve those who contribute the most to their campaigns.
Many lines were drawn in the sand on January 18th. Between the outlets who prioritize their readers and those that serve their advertisers. Between media corporations that understand the digital generation, and those that don’t. And between out of touch lawmakers, and those plugged into the collective online consciousness.
Many bonds were forged on that day too. As those that joined in the fight to # StopSOPA worked their magic on Twitter, allies were found and new friendships were born. Those who self-identify as Occupiers and/or Anons, who are more used to working outside the system, stood shoulder-to-shoulder online with mainstream businesses that had the balls to stick their necks out for the cause. Tactics were learned and shared. Hashtags were trended and jacked. A seemingly disparate group of activists, non-profits, and progressive corporations worked together as powerful machines of dissent, and have continued to do so in the months since, not only coordinating protests against the curtailment of Internet rights, but real world ones too, such as those threatened by the #NDAA.
Another lesson was learned that day too. For too long, our politicians, and the corporations that have pwned them, have had it too easy, ruling over an apathetic, ill-informed, distracted, and, for the most part, docile population that might run riot over a lost Giants game but by and large won’t fight for basic human rights. But that’s changing. Rebellion is in the air and it was online like never before on #J18.
An exceedingly bright young man called Jake Davis (a.k.a. Lulzsec hactivist Topiary) once said that “laws are to be respected when they’re fair, not obeyed without question.” Unfortunately, the laws that rule the Internet are often decidedly unfair, and are frequently so arbitrary and arcane that they’d be laughable but for the fact that good people are languishing in jail and businesses have been destroyed because of them.
At best these laws are outdated, as is the case with those that fall under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which predates the hyperlinked Internet as we know it. At worst, they’re stacked in favor of big business and special interest groups, as was the case with the MPAA-promoted travesties of judgment that were PIPA and SOPA. Indeed the labyrinth of archaic and/or poorly drafted legislation with regards to computers and the Internet is so confusing that even our judiciary has a hard time navigating them. So how on earth do we expect the average end user to?
As I write these final paragraphs, two fairly random recent news items come to mind that are not entirely unconnected. The first is the story of a 9-year-old girl, who had her Winnie the Poo laptop confiscated by Finnish police after she attempted to preview a song by pop star Chisu’. After she inadvertently clicked on a Pirate Bay link, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre in Finland (TTVK) sent a missive demanding six hundred Euros from her father, who responded with a letter and photographs of a bought album and concert tickets. I’m not sure what lesson that 9-year-old girl learned about copyright and respect for authority, but I’m sure it wasn’t the one the copyright clowns or agents of the law intended.
The second story draws from a study conducted by the Munich School of Management and Copenhagen Business School, which indicates that the U. S. Government’s decision to shut down file hosting site Megaupload anyway in the wake of SOPA’s failure—an action that was done at the behest of the RIAA and MPAA—actually negatively impacted Hollywood box office revenues both in the U.S. and around the globe. Not surprisingly, non-blockbuster films that rely on word of mouth rather then big marketing budgets appeared to be most affected by Megaupload’s demise, which doesn’t bode well for the long term health of independent movie or music making if we’re to continue on this course of litigation and criminalization.
Indeed, there is a mounting weight of evidence which suggests that those who fileshare the most also legitimately buy the most. The irony here is that those who will likely be harmed by any future PIPA and SOPA-like legislation include those who are lobbying the hardest for it. Instead of investing in shoddy and mean-spirited legislation, the entertainment industry would be better served investing their money in talent and products worthy of our consumption. If they spent less time biting the 9-year-old hand that feeds them, and tying the hands of websites that either intentionally or unintentionally evangelize for them, we’d all be better off—and better entertained.
BLOWING CONGRESS WIDE OPEN
DAVID MOORE AND DONNY SHAW, FOR OPENCONGRESS
OpenCongress became an important source of information for countless thousands of concerned Americans who wanted to track developments in the SOPA/PIPA fight. OpenCongress brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, public comments, and more to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress. Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists already know what’s really going on in Congress. Now, everyone can be an insider.
We launched OpenCongress back in February 2007—recognizing the cliché, that’s some ancient history in Web time. Every day since then, we’ve watch-dogged the work of the publicly despised, partisan gridlocked, historically unproductive, systemically corrupt U. S. Congress. Along the way, huge issues have come up: in 2008, a global financial crisis and stimulus bill; in 2009, President Obama’s major health-care reform bill; in 2010, the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation; plus unemployment insurance, immigration bills, and many more.
Since 2007, OpenCongress has grown to receive up to one million visits per month from visitors searching to track and understand what’s happening in the U.S. Congress—averaging around twenty-five thousand visits per weekday. But over the past five years, our single biggest-ever day of traffic was January 18th, 2012—the day of the SOPA strike against net censorship. OpenCongress received over two hundred sixty thousand visits and more than half a million pageviews that day alone to bill pages for SOPA/PIPA—beating our previous single-day traffic peak of one hundred forty-five thousand on March 22nd, 2010, around the health-care bill.
The PPF team and I are proud of how OpenCongress served as a go-to public resource in the stop-SOPA movement. OpenCongress combines official government information with news and blog coverage, campaign contribution data, social wisdom from around the Web, and free public participation tools. We’re a free, open-source, not-for-profit, and non-partisan public resource with primary funding support from the Sunlight Foundation.
On the day of the SOPA/ PIPA strike, organized by a diverse coalition including our sibling non-profit Fight For the Future,
OpenCongress received links to our bill page for SOPA and PIPA from major sites like Craigslist, reddit, Mozilla, and especially from search engines. Our extensive blog coverage of the net censorship threat and movement to oppose it received significant traffic and helped explain the arcane legislative process to a wide audience. Our wiki community project on PIPA urged our user community to whip their members of Congress, and especially members on key committees, in opposition to SOPA and PIPA.
Screenshot of Open Congress’ SOPA/PIPA whip count tool
Our non-profit organization, the Participatory Politics Foundation, and the OpenCongress project took a strong stance in opposition to SOPA for a number of reasons—not least of which being that we viewed it as an existential threat to OpenCongress’s mission of government transparency. A post-SOPA hypothetical world in which websites could be taken down unilaterally by the government without due process simply for linking to an allegedly offending site—as OpenCongress automatically aggregates links—would be chilling beyond belief. It was an almost unbelievably fundamentally-flawed piece of legislation that perfectly encapsulated the systemic corruption of the U.S. Congress—both of the major parties—by lobbyists and campaign contributions. Any notion of public benefit was very nearly steamrolled by a rushed push to vote on the bill with minimal expert or public input. PPF’s mission is to increase civic engagement over the Web, so we believe in strong net freedom and digital rights.
Since Nov. 26, 2011—American Censorship Day, protesting the bills—pages with SOPA info on OC received over seven hundred thousand views and PIPA over two hundred fifty thousand—totaling over a million pageviews combined. Since its introduction in October 2011, SOPA info has received over eight hundred fifty thousand pageviews; PIPA info, since May 2011, approx. three hundred fifty thousand pageviews; totaling 1.2 million pageviews on OpenCongress.
One popular OpenCongress feature is that we let users vote “aye” or “nay” on individual bills by our users. Together, SOPA/PIPA were the least-popular legislation with our user community in the past year, with a less than 1% approval rating.
The wiki community project to Whip Count on PIPA exceeded our wildest expectations. Using the Whip Count, citizens were able to pin down the position of each and every senator (though for 23 of them, that position was “undeclared”). The call log shows that users contacted those senators more who were undeclared or supported PIPA, exactly as a lobbyist would pressure those senators on her whip sheet who had noncommittal or undesired positions.
The mobilization of a vast number of citizens contacting their members of Congress is only half of the story of how the Great SOPA Showdown of 2012 shows that the Internet is changing politics. To be sure, the calls deluging congressional offices were the decisive factor in the bills’ defeat, but the use of free and open-source Web tools for online activism marked this as the first substantial case of the conversation between citizens and elected officials to happen in full public view. At OpenCongress, we built two tools that helped make this possible, with our wiki whip count and our free Contact-Congress feature.
Contact-Congress on OC bypasses the clunky webforms on individual congressional webpages, letting users send emails to their representative and senators from one place and includes information like campaign contributions they received from industries involved in the legislation. OpenCongress visitors used a number of other tools, including our money-in-politics analysis, supporter and opposition list, bill version tracking, and user-marked-up text of the bills.
Part of what makes Contact Congress particularly useful from a social perspective are its fidelity and sharing features. Users have the ability to make a letter publicly viewable, which enables them to share not only their letter but also the response from their senator or representative. Because the letter is routed through OpenCongress’ system, others can trust that the response has not been altered. It now becomes a public, verifiable source for a congressperson’s position on a bill. Because this was largely a one-day campaign, our users didn’t have time to receive many responses to post, but here’s a great example from one senator.
Grassroots campaigns to influence Congress have typically picked an upcoming vote or bill and asked citizens nationwide to call or email both their senators and/or their representative. The more sophisticated versions might only target citizens who live in the district of the members of the particular committee hearing a bill or pre-fill a letter in a webform that people can amend (or not) and send with a click. Constituents may receive a call or email back, but that usually concludes the conversation.
What made SOPA different was that much of the exchange between constituents and officials was being posted online, thus merging many private one-to-one conversations into a massive one-to-many conversation. And the back-and-forths between different citizens and the same senator thus changed from iterations of the same query-and-response into a continuing discussion between that senator and the public at large.
It might have ended there, but citizens started using social media to track the conversations and coordinate responses. Some top-voted threads on reddit posted the defections from the bill and senators took to their Facebook pages to announce their opposition to the bill, which were promptly commented on, liked, and shared on the personal pages of constituents at volumes many times the average post. What transformed these public conversations from an effective way for people in any state to influence their senators into a way for the people to influence the senate as a body was the adoption of a common lobbyists’ tool: the whip sheet. Whip sheets are simple lists of every member of the House or Senate with their current position on a bill. Well-funded lobby shops will chop up the list and send delegates to buttonhole each member and then target and re-target the members opposite their position until the get the necessary number of votes to win. They are even used by congressional leaders to make sure they have the votes to forward their party’s agenda.
SOPA Opera (http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/, now at ProPublica) was the first effort to put a people’s whip sheet online. It used members’ sponsorship of SOPA/PIPA or votes on previous, similar bills to make a rough prediction of where the current vote stood, which staff then augmented as more of them made public positions on the bills. Then OpenCongress posted the Protect IP Act Senate Whip Count, a user-editable form with every senator’s phone numbers, email contact forms, last known position on PIPA, and a call log for users to record the date, time, and content of their communications with Congress.
A screenshot of ProPublica’s SOPA Opera whip count.
SOPA and PIPA showed that citizens can overwhelm Washington with public sentiment, at least when prompted to by the highest-traffic websites in the world. Short of such likely rare events, however, it is the adaptation and adoption of traditional lobbyist tools like vote counting—through whip sheets—and coordination of communications—through social media and tools like Contact Congress—that will help level the playing field between the body politic and the lobby.
To quote one of Prof. Yochai Benkler’s presentations on his ongoing research on the SOPA strike actions: “What you see is a complex relationship between NGOs and commercial organizations, between V.C.’s and activists, between traditional media and online media, between political media left and right and tech media, all weaving together a model of actually looking, learning, mobilizing for action, and blocking [SOPA]. This, ideally, is the shape of the networked public sphere.”
Prof. Benkler’s vision is core to PPF’s founding mission—that the open Web can and will generate networks for peer-to-peer watchdogging of our elected officials, mitigating systemic corruption in government, and improving political outcomes for the public benefit. For example, the free OCv3 online organizing features used in the stop-SOPA movement can help groups engage with any of the bills and issues they’re tracking at the federal level. Our ongoing work to turn OpenCongress into a two-way platform for continual, reciprocal communication with elected officials will result
in a more deliberative and participatory democracy.
WHY REDDIT HELPED KILL SOPA
ALEXIS OHANIAN
Alexis Ohanian speaking at the NY Tech Emergency Meetup January 18, 2012
Alexis Ohanian is a startup founder and investor in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from UVA in 2005, Alexis co-founded reddit, now a top 100 website. Now a reddit board member, Alexis focuses on social enterprise Breadpig, publishing authors like xkcd and SMBC, and donating profits to worthy causes. Alexis helped launch hipmunk and ran marketing/pr/community before becoming an advisor and joining the fight against SOPA & PIPA.
As an entrepreneur, I never expected to find “political activist” in my bio, but here we are.
At the time I started “hacking politics,” I’d been running marketing and PR for hipmunk, a travel search startup I’d helped launch just a year earlier with my reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and our friend Adam Goldstein. Other than work, my days were spent outlining my book, Without Your Permission, trying to be a good angel investor, and agonizing over my favorite team, the Washington Redskins.
My foray into the political arena began with an email on November 6, 2011. Christina Xu, who works with me at Breadpig—a social enterprise I’d started—sent along a note from a friend who alerted her to a pair of bills that looked destined to pass the House and Senate before the New Year.
Written with over $94 million in lobbying from the entertainment industry, the first versions of SOPA and PIPA read as though a technologist had never even been consulted. If either of these bills had been law back in 2005 when Steve and I founded reddit together, the site wouldn’t exist today.
Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet Page 26