The Threat Posed By A Wild-West Internet

There was a moment of high media drama last week when protests against mooted anti-piracy legislation in the US saw the temporary voluntary closure of a number of websites. The most prominent was Wikipedia, which took a day out, blocking access to the site’s vast volumes of information, in order to make a point: this is what censorship of the web might look like. But protests against the impending legislation were orchestrated too through Google, Facebook and other huge multinational capitalist interests.

The effect of the protests was immediate: Congress in the US postponed discussion of the so called PIPA (Protect IP Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bills “until a compromise is reached.” In effect, they were capitulating to the threats of online activists and vested interests. The nature of any potential compromise remains to be seen. As of now, there seems to be no suggestion whatsoever of common ground between those who believe that anything, no matter who originated or owns it, is fair game for use or abuse on the internet; and those who insist that people are entitled (a) to control their own original creative output and (b) to payment for its use or dissemination.
To be clear, on a number of different levels, this is not always a black and white issue. For a start, legislation in countries across Europe and around the world differs widely. Quite correctly, in Ireland at least, not everything which pretends to ‘originality’ qualifies as such. In many jurisdictions, including here, work which an individual is employed to do, for example, is in a different category to that which is produced free of any immediate promise of reward. But either way, there is an ultimate copyright owner ­– whether it is the artist, the record company, the publisher, the performer or in the case of the print media writers, newspapers or magazines. Indeed in many instances, a multiplicity of those interests are involved.
The SOPA bill is – or was – radical in that it proposed to give the power to content owners, individually or collectively, and the US government alike, to request court orders to shut down sites associated with piracy. Under the terms of the bill, advertisers, payment processors and internet service providers would also be forbidden from doing business with copyright infringers that are based overseas.
In some ways, as is obvious from the above, the proposed legislation was hamfisted, among other things having about it a suspicious whiff of xenophobia. In its original form, SOPA would also require search engines to remove ‘foreign’ infringing sites from their results. Both SOPA and PIPA would have required internet service providers to block users from being able to access suspect sites, using a technique called Domain Name System (DNS) blocking.
The Motion Picture Association of America, among other copyright owners, has been lobbying for these measures, which are also loosely supported by record companies, music publishers and numerous other organisations that represent the interests of content owners. Ranked on the other side is virtually the entire tech industry – a curious coalition of idealists and utter chancers, acting (whether they intend to or otherwise) in the interest of protecting the wealth of the world’s biggest ISP interests – including Facebook (which is verging on a global monopoly), Google (which can be described in similar terms), Yahoo (trailing but trying to get back in the race) and Twitter.
Curiously, in an editorial on the theme, the Irish Times described the protests as an expression of democracy. It is a word which is liberally bandied about, in relation to the kind of activities which are driven by ‘social’ media. But of course the protests have nothing to do with ‘democracy’. While the internet has had a hugely liberating effect in any number of ways, you can equally argue, for example, that the protests are the expression of the prejudice of those who are enamoured of the patently wrong notion that the internet is without qualification a place where ‘freedom’ flourishes; or that they are the product of the vested interests of the ISPs, who are engaged in an ongoing campaign of lobbying, manipulation and bullying of their own – of which the latest protest is just the most overt.
To repeat, in hundreds of ways, the internet has proven to be a wonderfully liberating thing. To suggest otherwise would be absurd. And it is an arena in which freedom of expression has attained a new sense of immediacy. But that does not mean – cannot mean – that no-one is entitled to question the modus operandi of those who currently hold the keys to the biggest rooms in the internet hotel. Nor is it a moral or political value in itself. There is no reason whatsoever that the internet should presume itself to be free of the conventions, norms and laws that operate in ordinary, democratic, civil society. Because if that were the case then – to take the most obviously nauseating example – child pornography should be allowed to flourish there.
And yet, that seems to be the objective of those protesting against SOPA and PIPA.
Otherwise, why is it that not one of the biggest internet companies in the world – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or any of the rest of them – has made even the slightest gesture towards addressing the reality that music, movies, TV programmes, books and other forms of original creative activity are all being systematically copied without permission and disseminated, in certain cases well in advance of either being finished or of their official release dates, to the detriment of those who are producing (and as it happens, financing) them?
People talk about the bottom line. Well, here it is. Over the past six years, the global value of the music industry – to take just one of the concerned stakeholders – has been reduced by half to $20 billion. Over the same period, the revenues of the ISPs has doubled to $250 billion. There is a direct link between these figures.
If no money were changing hands for what appears on the internet, or vast profits were not being made, then we might be observing an idealistic and therefore wonderfully admirable desire to maintain a commerce-free zone intact, in action. But nothing could be further from the reality. In truth, the ISPs have a vested commercial – that is, capitalist – interest in resisting the idea that they or their customers might have to pay in one form or another for the use of copyright material accessed on the internet. Of the top 100 sites in the world, just 10% do not take advertising. That ultimately is what they are after: even bigger profits based on increased ad revenues.
The battle is not one between the vested interests of the music industry and ordinary people or small-town bloggers; it is between the Goliath that the telecoms industry has become and the David into which the music industry – and the artists it represents – has shrunk. Any other presentation of what is at stake here is essentially misleading.
The issue is a live one in Ireland right now, with the Minister for State at the Department of Enterprise and Employment Sean Sherlock due to publish the ‘instrument’ via which ISPs or websites can be challenged on providing access to pirated copyright material. It will be fascinating to watch how this plays out over the coming weeks.
There is a possibility that Ireland can become a leader in the field, striving to reach a genuine accommodation between the different vested interests – and hopefully handing a modicum of power and choice back to artists and those who represent them.
Everyone likes it when something they want or need is provided free of charge. That is human nature. And everyone is perfectly entitled to give away what they produce, free of any form of commercial consideration, if that is what they freely choose to do. But the thrust of ISP thinking is not to support the freedom of artists or record companies to give away their songs or their music; it is to support those who insist that whether the artists or records companies or anyone else likes it or not, their music has to be available for anyone to filch without paying a cent.
Where is the freedom in that campaign of coercion? There is none. Or that, at least, is the counter-view to the line being pursued by those who protested against SOPA and PIPA. One thing is certain: this debate will run and run. But it will not end until the rights of artists and creators are properly recognised and respected in the new dispensation of the digital world. 
In the meantime, it is an issue that will be dealt with at The Music Show, which runs over the weekend of February 25 and 26 in the RDS, Dublin. The debate will be a fascinating one...