Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Hey, who turned off the lights?


Why is Wikipedia staging a blackout and what is SOPA?
By Daniel Kasor
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Wikipedia is set to go dark at 12:00 a.m. ET Wednesday and will remain down until 12:00 a.m. ET the following day. (Wikimedia)
Lost without Wikipedia? The National Post’s got you covered. Steve Murray answers your fact-finding inquiries, starting 10:00 am ET at natpo.st/postipedia
Need to know about the Wikipedia blackout? In this occasional feature, the National Post tells you everything you need to know about the a complicated issue. Beginning midnight Wednesday, crowd-sourced knowledge database Wikipedia will go dark and will be offline for 24 hours as a protest against proposed anti-piracy legislation in the United States. We give you the inside scoop on why the sixth most popular website on the planet has decided to turn itself off for a day and how you can access its pages even though it is offline.


How long will the site be blacked out? The blackout starts at 12:00 a.m. eastern time (5:00 a.m. GMT) on Wednesday morning and will last until 12:00 a.m. eastern time on Thursday (also 5:00 a.m. GMT).

What exactly is blacked out? The English-language version of Wikipedia will be offline and replaced with a message related to the anti-piracy legislation going through Congress, SOPA, in the United States. Other language editions of Wikipedia will be unaffected.

Additionally, popular community website Reddit will also be offline, as well as Boing-Boing and several smaller websites
.
WordPress is suggesting users black out their own websites, but is not forcing any blackouts.


Whoa, SOPA? What the heck is that? SOPA, which stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a piece of legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives. The act is designed to target copyright infringers online through a series of harsh penalties.In the U.S. Senate, a separate companion bill is called the Protect Intellectual Property Act or PIPA.
What are the battle lines in the debate? The fight over SOPA is generally seen as a major clash between Hollywood and old media, and Silicon Valley. The backers of the legislation include the Motion Picture Association of America (the MPAA), the major movie studios and television networks, most major book publishers and several ISPs. They say that without the legislation at least 2.2 million industry jobs would be at risk.

A large number of Internet content companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! and several others have publicly come out against the legislation. Certain companies, such as Google, have spent a great deal on lobbying against they bill. They say the legislation would turn the Internet into a police state.
Read more on efforts to change the proposed legislation:
‘Three key section of the existing legislation seem likely to remain, a person familiar with the matter says. They comprise provisions aimed at getting search engines to disable links to foreign infringing sites; provisions that cut off advertising services to those sites; and provisions that cut off payment processing.‘But critical provisions that would require Internet service providers such as Verizon Communications and Comcast Corp. to cut off infringing sites through a technology known as DNS blocking are now likely to be eliminated’
2.2 million jobs sound like a lot. Why do the SOPA opponents say it would turn the Internet into a police state? Several of the provisions in SOPA force American Internet service providers or ISPs hosting websites to remove a site from the Internet if there’s a claim it’s infringing against copyright, even if it has not been fully proved in court. The argument is that this would make it easy for someone to make false or weak claims to take a website offline while the case makes its way through the courts.
Additionally, it would force ISPs to block non-U.S. websites accused of having infringing material, meaning sites from other countries might not be available in the United States. Opponents say this might destabilize the Internet and allow loopholes for hackers to exploit.

Which sites that I use would this affect? Most obviously, Wikipedia. There are millions of users who constantly update the site, and sometimes things are posted that might have questionable copyright provenance. If Wikipedia were shut down or blocked every time it was challenged over copyright, the site would likely cease to function.

YouTube would be another site that would be harshly affected by the measures. Since millions of people upload videos to YouTube, sometimes copyrighted material slips through. Currently, this is dealt with by individual videos being taken down after a complaint. Google has stated YouTube probably wouldn’t exist if a SOPA-like law had been in effect in 2004 when the site launched.

Some interpretations of the bill say that sites that even link to other sites accused of infringing might be at risk.

Basically, any site that has a large user-generated component is worried about SOPA. This is the document Wikipedia references when explaining why they are against the bill.

How can I get around the blackout? If you do a Google search for a Wikipedia page, you should be offered the option to use a “Google Cache” version of the page. This is a past version of the page Google has stored on its own servers.

Doesn’t the blackout hurt Wikipedia’s reputation as a neutral source of information? Possibly. On its page explaining the blackout, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner had these words: “In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them. But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not.” Read more about Sue Gardner in a profile on the Canadian-born Wikipedia executive from FP magazine.

Why aren’t Google and Facebook blacking out like Wikipedia? Unlike Wikipedia, which is a not-for-profit, Google and Facebook have a huge number of shareholders to appease. Google will, however, be altering its home and search pages to alert people to the blackout day.

This all sounds pretty bad, why are so many people for it? The argument is best summed up by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch as posted on Twitter: “Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.”

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