SOPA what?

David Carr explains SOPA legislation, why it matters, and why legislators shouldn't legislate things of which they're proud of their ignorance.

The debate has highlighted how little Congress knows about the Internet they are proposing to re-tool. In a piece often cited on the Web, the computer culture journalist Joshua Kopstein watched the debate in Congress in which members bragged about their online ignorance, and he wrote an open letter on the technology Web site Motherboard titled, “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer O.K. to Not Know How the Internet Works.”

Whether they know what they are doing or not, lawmakers seem intent on moving forward.
Congressional supporters of piracy legislation have been in a big hurry because the Web is starting to come alive with opposition — nearly 90,000 Tumblr users have phoned members of Congress and more than a million people have signed an online petition protesting the legislation.

Last week, in a much talked about blog post, Declan McCullagh of CNet speculated that even though big Web companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook are outgunned in terms of political connections, they have the capability to turn their sites into billboards denouncing SOPA and utilizing their close, constant relationship with consumers.

I like my movies (and music and television) as much as the next couch potato, probably more. And I wouldn’t steal content for any reason, in part because I make a living generating a fair amount of it. But it’s worth remembering that the film industry initially opposed the video cassette recorder and the introduction of DVDs, platforms that became very lucrative businesses for them and remarkable conveniences for the rest of us. 

 It's worth a read.

The Googles and free speech

I suppose I should be shocked and disturbed that three people in Mountain View, CA make these kinds of momentous decisions.

In late 2006, for example, Wong and her colleagues debated what to do about a series of videos that insulted the king of Thailand, where a lêse-majesté law makes criticisms of the king a criminal offense. Wong recalls hearing from an employee in Asia that the Thai government had announced that it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P. address. Soon after, a Thai government official sent Wong a list of the U.R.L.’s of 20 offensive videos that he demanded Google remove as a condition of unblocking the site. Some of the videos were sexually explicit or involved hate speech and thus clearly violated the YouTube terms of service. Some ridiculed the king — by depicting him with his feet on his head, for example — and were clearly illegal under Thai law but not U.S. law. And others — criticizing the Thai lêse-majesté law itself — weren’t illegal in Thailand but offended the government.

After an extensive debate with McLaughlin and Walker, Wong concluded that since the lêse-majesté law had broad democratic support in Thailand, it would be better to remove the videos that obviously violated Thai law while refusing to remove the videos that offended the government but didn’t seem to be illegal. All three told me they were reassured by the fact that Google could accommodate the Thai government by blocking just the videos that were clearly illegal in Thailand (and blocking those for Thai users only), leaving them free to exercise their independent judgment about videos closer to the line. The Thai government was apparently able to live with this solution.

But we are talking about videos.

A series of tubes

I'm not willing to give Alaskans a pass overall, but at least they squeaked by on this one. A recount is likely, I suppose, but in the meantime...

for Ted: