Postponing the SOPA did nothing in postponing the US government from doing part of what the act set out to do: blocking access to certain sites while unilaterally shutting down others without due process. Arin de Hoog about RIAA, PIPA, ACTA and all the other heads of the “anti-piracy”-hydra trying to cut Internet freedom – and why he as a fan of hockey thinks it’s not fair play.
Trying to watch American sports in Europe, ice hockey in my case, can be a tricky thing when living in Europe. One problem is that, with repeated commercial breaks, a game can go for three and a half hours. Which is fine, except that they tend to start between 1 and 3 in the morning depending on where on the North American continent they are being played. This means that by the time the final period rolls around you’re not even sure who you’re cheering for anymore.
If the game then goes into overtime you’re not even sure if it’s hockey you’re watching or The Lion King on Ice. Did Poomba just get cross-checked by Scar, or did I dream that?
Regardless, with modern technology, and tweaked connectivity you can watch a game live even if you don’t own a television with an 800 channel cable package or a satellite dish, which I don’t, nor can afford. Helpfully there are sites that provide live streaming of games, and although the quality of the picture is about as good as an 80s tube-driven Sanyo, you’re able to make out the pixelated players doing something that looks vaguely hockey-like.
This is why I wasn’t too bothered when the Superbowl happened last Sunday. I figured I could call up any one of the fifteen sites, which I know stream sports, and watch large men with no necks collide at lumbering speeds.
Except, I couldn’t.
It turns out that the US government had seized as many of the streaming sites they could get their hands on and shut them down. In hockey terminology this is what’s known as the exercising of ‘structural power which determines globally, not only the way nation states relate to the power-holder, but how nation states relate to corporate entities and the individual, because the power-holder is the creator if the existing framework in which the corporation, the state, and the individual operate.’ Clearly hockey is a thinking man’s game, therefore the terminology can be quite complex.
Basically what this means is that, because the US sets and guides the environment in which the internet operates, it can also affect how its being used regardless of international borders.
What is telling about the Superbowl streaming site seizures is not how the US was able to do it, but the fact that they simply just did it.
Now hang on a second. What about the widely-known SOPA protest that left many people with cubicle jobs with nothing to do that day? We all remember the 18th of January when hundreds of popular websites went black, including reddit, boingboing, MoveOn.org , MineCraft, and WordPress.org. The most terrifying for students across the world was, of course, Wikipedia disappearing for an entire day. Doubtless the offices of professors were filled with hysterical laughter the following week, and for several weeks after.
This was a popular uprising on- and offline, which was designed to scare congress and the SOPA purveyors into backing down (although, in my personal opinion, if twitter, facebook, and all porn sites shut down that day, it would have really put the fear in them). And it did. On the 20th US Congress postponed ratifying the bill.
However, since then, 23-year-old Richard O’Dwyer, a British national and website operator, was targeted by the US Justice Department, and the British government okayed his extradition off of England’s soil. On the 20th of last month the US shut down megaupload, a Hong Kong-based file sharing company, and nabbed it’s CEO in New Zealand, replacing the site with the increasingly familiar FBI anti-piracy warning depicting official-looking badges of eagles looking stern. When megaupload was sniped many other filesharing sites — including filesonic, BTjunkie, and filserve — fled like a pack of puppies when the vacuum cleaner is turned on.
And, of course, you couldn’t watch the Superbowl outside of the US unless you snuck into the NBC website — which involved some dubious internet trickery — or managed to have access to BBC One online.
Basically postponing the Stop Online Piracy Act did nothing in postponing the US from doing part of what the act set out to do: blocking access to certain sites while unilaterally shutting down others without due process. That last sentence was a tough one to write because I don’t want to take the clichéd anti-‘US Imperialist agenda’ stance which has been popular for, say, the last hundred years or so. Unfortunately, however, trying to describe aggravating behaviour without an advocacy slant is like trying to describe how much internet policy-makers know about the internet without using the word ‘none’.
A main driver behind SOPA and PIPA (once a nice name for a pretty British girl, now the ‘Protect IP Act’) are the RIAA (Recording Industry Artists of America), and the record companies which continue to delight us with auto-tuned pre-pubescents howling single-word song lyrics about each others’ asses. Another is the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), which is famous for showing us automobiles exploding since 1922, now in 3D. They feel that they’re taking a hit by people copying their profound creative endeavours and being entertained by it for free.
In fact, the MPAA is behind ACTA, the Rambo: European Blood version of SOPA and PIPA. ACTA (The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is a beast of a multi-lateral agreement which basically allows your internet service provider to be bullied into watching everything you do online and reporting it to authorities if you are “suspected of infringement activities”. It is so beastly that it spooked European Minister Kader Arif, the EU Parliament’s independent monitor for ACTA, into resigning. He cited: “no consultation of the civil society, lack of transparency since the beginning of negotiations, repeated delays of the signature of the text without any explanation given, reject[ion] of Parliament’s recommendations as given in several resolutions of our assembly” as reasons he thought the bill smelled funny.
On Saturday world-wide protests were happening against this new incarnation of SOPA. The fear here is that this multi-lateral agreement will actually work a lot better than the ones having to do with curbing global warming, and peace in the Middle East.
It also, again, raises the question of corporate interest groups doing what they want regardless of how many people stand against it, even if the ACTA head of the anti-piracy hydra is lopped off… which, by the way, is called ‘goalie interference’ in hockey terms.
arindehoog 