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On Thursday a massive internet protest produced one of the most impressive victories against an oppressive government bill. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and its little brother Protect IP Act (PIPA) both lost most of their support in the US Senate and Congress with over a dozen elected officials backing away from their support of the bill, including several cosponsors of each respective bill.
Both bills were designed to provide a strong tool for shutting down websites. They would essentially give the government the power to take down any site, foreign or domestic, for a link to illegally downloadable copyrighted material, even if said link had been placed there by a user. It was feared the law would be abused to take down any website using user generated content and generated a huge backlash from the tech industry.
That backlash took shape on January 18th when sites like Google and Wikipedia altered or completely blocked their services with information about what SOPA was and how people could help. Within a few hours the calls and e-mails to the offices of representatives resulted in individuals like Senator Patrick Leahy, democratic senator from Vermont and the main sponsor of the bill, saying: 'The day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem.’ Of course that day happened to be Wednesday, and he just admitted that.
Rarely have so many senators and congressmen been sent into retreat so quickly. Much credit goes to the people who petitioned them to make this change. But there is still a question of whether or not this would have happened if the big bag Hollywood businesses hadn't been opposed by the big tech industry businesses.
Before the campaigns by Wikipedia, Google, and Reddit, most people were in the dark about SOPA. In the weeks leading out to the blackout, SOPA was covered a depressing small number of times. On the major news networks, there were only two mentions of SOPA over a period of 3 months, as detailed by Media Matters.
The media companies who own those channels were sponsoring SOPA, so it's probably not surprising that their news agencies didn't cover it considering how obviously terrible it would sound to the people. In a sense, the media industry has tacitly acknowledged that SOPA would be bad for the average person, and good for them, which makes one wonder if the US government is serving the people, or the corporations who donate to them.
But back to SOPA itself, with the public ignorant of its impending impact on the online world, would it still have been stopped if one big money interest hadn't been inconvenienced by another big money interest? Highly unlikely, and while defeating SOPA is still a populist win of sorts, it does show that unless there's money at stake, no one will notice or care when an even more dreadful bill is excreted out of the US Senate.
José Gonzalez
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