An Inactivist Writes ...

As though Sordel needed an excuse to down tools and interrupt the all-too terminable process of binding in nutshells: tomorrow will see a pointed not-working to rule as I join the masses doing precisely nothing to prevent the passage of a U.S. law.

Wednesday 18th January sees a web-wide protest against two pieces of legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These laws, if passed, will give copyright holders wide powers to close or block online sites holding copyright material. Moreover, they will make sites such as YouTube and (for that matter) Blogger responsible for hosting material that infringes copyright. They will also extend the U.S. legal position on copyright throughout the world by forcing U.S. companies (such as PayPal) not to trade with sites subject to allegations of copyright infringement.

The provisions of SOPA are wide-ranging, and cannot be reduced to the most obvious infractions, such as a website set up to stream pre-release copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. To take one example, if one assumes that the material published by Wikileaks was the intellectual property of the U.S. government, then it would be the case that Google could be placed under an injunction preventing it from linking to Wikileaks as part of a web search.

Moreover, the holder of the intellectual property does not need to prove an infringement; it merely needs to notify third parties of the infringement. A hosting service would have to withdraw all services from Wikileaks immediately once notified by the complainant and - if it resumed those services on the basis of a satisfactory counter-notice from Wikileaks - it would itself be vulnerable to legal action on the part of the complainant.

Moreover, if Google (for example) decided that it were safer to comply with the complaint and remove the Wikileaks site from its engine, it would be immune from action by Wikileaks even if the complaint were never upheld by any court. Voluntary suspension of services is specifically defended by the law, but there is no protection for a company that continues to extend services to a site, even if that site has provided reasonable evidence that it is not infringing copyright.

Moreover, what if the site, rather than being Wikileaks, were to be, say, a British newspaper reporting a U.S. government leak?

Effectively, then, SOPA enables limitless penalties to be levied upon any site whatsoever without the complaining party ever winning a legal action. Most of the legal liability falls not upon the complainant or even on the alleged copyright violator: it falls instead upon the companies that provide points of access to internet content.

(It would, by the way, become a civil crime knowingly to make a claim of intellectual property against a site where no such claim existed, but then the site owner would require the means and the evidence to sue the complainant, and the complainant would have to be wealthy enough to make such a suit viable.)

Sordel's opposition to SOPA is staunch but, in the interests of full disclosure, I do source a large number of my factoids from Wikipedia, which is leading the protest and will be closed tomorrow. Anyone seeking to conclude that the drawing down of Nutbinding shutters makes a virtue of a necessity would, of course, be quite quite wrong.