Google blackouts home page in protest of SOPA and PIPA
If you visit the OpenCongress page for House bill “HR 3261 – Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA)” take a glance at the long list of supporters and opposers to the measure. You’ll notice that among the supporters are the Motion Picture Association of America, NBC Universal, Viacom, News Corp, Disney, Time Warner, Comcast, the National Football League, etc., and that among the opposers are Google, Disqus, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, ACLU, etc. You’ll also find some unusual suspects in the “support” camp (Nike Inc, Pfizer, Philip Morris).
If you step back for a minute from the list, the division between the two camps becomes clear. Those in the information technology and sharing space are pitting themselves against the entertainment-industrial complex. You could make the case that another set of interesting divides appear: Silicon Valley v.s. Hollywood, or even Northern California v.s. Southern California. But there is something more fundamental that demarcates the two camps which is arguably evident in the cultural divide between Northern and Southern California: protecting ideas over people versus protecting people over ideas. Silicon Valley definitely falls into the former category, whereas Hollywood might fall into the latter. However, the notion of “protecting people over ideas” is a bit twisted in the Era of Corporate Personhood since the intellectual property rights of artists in the entertainment industry belong de jure to the corporations that back them and sell their art. And so really the latter boils down to protecting corporate interests over ideas.
There is something far scarier about this cultural-conceptual division albeit subtle. We might spend time battling over whether ideas ought to be protected over corporations. The telling outcome of these battles in public life however is that our political institutions have a history of bowing to the corporation–above ideas, above living people. It’s possible that with enough public pressure the outcome of this battle will lean differently than the others, but more broadly there must be a critical examination of the influence of certain corporations in the United States and throughout the world if they continue to ram legislation through our political institutions in all-too receptive environments.
Hopefully, whatever versions of SOPA/PIPA that make it to the House/Senate will be voted down on January 24. If there’s anything our political leaders can learn from the likes of pioneers at the vanguard of information technology, it’s “Don’t be evil.” But then again, even pioneers can be hypocrites.