how your kids were taught to hate SOPA

Post-blackout analysis continues today with a general recognition that US legislators have been scared away from legislating, and a new approach to attacking the problem of online piracy will have to be designed.

You can see this as something anywhere on the spectrum from great victory for grassroots democracy to needless waste of time and legislative effort. My view should be apparent.

Before I leave the topic for now, though, there is one aspect of the this blackout story that continues to nag.

How the message was spread that SOPA and PIPA were apparently so threatening to humankind.

Google and Wikipedia, among a number of other prominent web-based companies (mostly for-profit... mostly for obscene levels of profit), have permanently handed in their neutrality cards and made it perfectly clear that they will do everything in their power to influence your political opinions.

Fair enough for Google, I suppose. I don't know anyone outside the free-culture fanatics club who still believes Google has only our best interests at heart. How Wikipedians deal with their own suddenly unmasked bias will be interesting to watch. If Stephen Colbert has not yet coined the term factiness, I offer it to him free of charge.

Very sadly, the popular teaching site Khan Academy also got into the act on Wednesday. Who does not love the idea of  Khan's short, engaging, simplifying video lessons for kids and adult learners on subjects as broad as simple arithmetics to advanced physics? During the blackout, we learned that Khan had uploaded a special lesson on SOPA. I encourage everyone to go watch it here - but as you watch it, I would ask that you apply as fine a legal filter as you can muster. To me, there is something simply horrifying in the lack of legal nuance on display in Khan's anti-SOPA lesson -- and let's not fool ourselves, this is not a lesson about specific legislation; it is teaching against specific legislation that reflects an undisclosed worldview.

Khan very engagingly draws out a diagram of how SOPA is intended to work. He then goes into the language of the proposed bill to show fearful consequences. Those consequences, he emphasizes again and again could be as bad as someone shutting down YouTube or Facebook or any other prominent American site "on a whim."

Here's how he does it. Have a look at the legislative language quoted below, especially the words in red text:

(1) DEDICATED TO THEFT OF U.S. PROPERTY- An `Internet site is dedicated to theft of U.S. property' if--

(i) the U.S.-directed site is primarily designed or operated for the purpose of, has only limited purpose or use other than, or is marketed by its operator or another acting in concert with that operator for use in, offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables, or facilitates--

As though breaking down the reasoning behind 2 + 2 = 4, Khan explains that since YouTube and Facebook can be seen as sometimes enabling or facilitating copyright infringement, they would qualify as "dedicated to theft of U.S. property," and QED they could be shut down ... on a whim.

Teach your children well.

Let's look at that wording again with a slightly different emphasis:

(i) the U.S.-directed site is primarily designed or operated for the purpose of, has only limited purpose or use other than, or is marketed by its operator or another acting in concert with that operator for use in, offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables, or facilitates--

Who believes YouTube or Facebook are primarily designed or operated for the purpose of, have only limited purpose or use other than, or are marketed by their operators to steal U.S. property? Raise your hands.

I thought not.

Shameful. 

Now, none of these examples of naked bias are particularly bad developments in my view. I hope everyone learns a lot from what has happened this week. I hope high school students everywhere now realize they need to ruthlessly question everything they read on Wikipedia and everything they watch on Khan Academy. I hope web searchers wonder how Google might just be filtering search results before they click I'm Feeling Lucky.

SOPA is dead, for now, and new legislation will have to be designed. In the meantime, I hope more folks start wondering just how much of that scary SOPA story we were told this week was actually true.

 
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you may just have become a gadget

There will be a lot of digital ink spilled analyzing yesterday's SOPA/PIPA website blackout protests. I made my own opinion clear, I hope, in yesterday's posting.

As I take a quick look around the web this morning, I see prominent members of the free culture movement crowing about a great victory. People noticed we were gone; that means they agree with us!

Okay.

I think the actual response will be far more nuanced and considered, and will be analyzed over a much longer period of time than half a day.... but that's me, a hopeless optimist for clear thinking.

Happy free culture commenters are already starting to think of January 18, 2012 as the day everything changed, the day new media permanently arm-wrestled control from old media - a sort of Emancipation Day.

If emancipation suddenly means that we all push the buttons we're told to push when we're told to push them, then I suppose those commenters are right. Wikipedia, Google, Reddit and a host of other "new media" powers told the world to jump yesterday, and a large part of the world asked "how high would you like us to jump, sirs?"

Me, I have always thought the old media/new media dichotomy was false.

The danger of so called "old" media was always that by its very structure it might act as a gatekeeper to real understanding. It might mistakenly or intentionally mislead, falsify or corrupt. Yesterday showed that so called "new" media carries the exact same danger.

The blackout was not about educating an uneducated public by giving them enough information so they could make up their own minds; it was about carefully curating the message (oh, Marshall McLuhan, where are you when we need you?), about directing people to one prescribed conclusion. Interestingly, while new media shuttered itself yesterday, they turned to old media to push their message. I heard many a technologist on radio and television last night repeating the standard buggy-whip talking points. That this curation of the message was run primarily by a supposedly neutral search engine and a supposedly neutral encyclopedia is, to me, deeply unsettling.

Newspapers and network television were never about mindlessly accepting what was presented to us without independent discussion, challenge and the hard work of making up our own minds. They could and sometimes they did drive opinion, but it was always up to us whether or not the media had the power to do so. Passive acceptance of the message is a choice.

It remains a choice even now, the day after that remarkable display of groupthink power that was Emancipation Day.

I don't think there's a sharper mind thinking about the Internet and the supposed old media/new media split than Jaron Lanier. Author of You are Not  a Gadget, inventor of virtual reality and researcher at Microsoft, Mr. Lanier walks his own path. He has alienated himself from many of his Silicon Valley friends by determinedly not drinking the Kool Aid (TM) of forced free culture.

In his op-ed in the New York Times yesterday, Lanier takes his friends to task. He argues that those who spread the false alarm about free speech yesterday regularly chill criticism and dissenting opinion within their own sector, and instead of fighting to secure a truly open Internet, they are actually fighting for the so called "free" territory they land-grabbed and intend to hold forever. The victory they are crowing about today is not a victory for you and me (especially if you clicked their links and made their threatening phone calls to legislators yesterday).

Mr. Lanier spoke in Toronto last year. That's him at the top of this posting, signing the print on paper book I bought from him. I recommend folks read You Are Not a Gadget.

Then read lots of other stuff, and make up your own minds. Or better yet, do whatever the hell you want to do. That's what real emancipation is all about.

 
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and there was light... and it was good

For the next 24 hours, I am protesting ridiculous alarmism by reading verified facts in a book, with a light on.

This morning, I gave a brief talk about copyright reform to the staff at the Etobicoke School of  the Arts. I did not refuse to give the talk. I did not cover my mouth with duct tape, or demand that all the lights and my Powerpoint (TM) presentation be turned off. Unlike the large tech firms and free culture activists who have decided to take their ball and go home today, I actually engaged with people who were very likely to disagree with a lot of what I had to say.

We talked about Bill C-11, Canada's Copyright Modernization Act, we talked about DRM and pirate sites. We also discussed the current Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, two pieces of American legislation that free-culturists unsurprisingly believe will destroy the Internet and lead to widespread censorship without due process. We agreed, disagreed, agreed to disagree; then we checked each other's sleeves for hidden knives* and went about our day.

*If you're wondering about that reference, check Wikipedia for "history of the handshake"... oh, never mind.

There are all sorts of things I find disturbing about this Internet blackout protest from free culture. To begin with, I'm hearing an awful lot of lip-service today about piracy being bad and everyone agreeing on that, but...

Does everyone agree that piracy is bad?

I've spent over a decade of my professional life arguing for artists' rights on the Internet, and I think I've only heard the words "piracy is bad" with any sincerity from people in my profession. Most of the time what I hear from free culturists is that piracy is good, that it helps to build my audience in places that can't easily access my work, that in the long run it will mean more money for me. Why are these folks suddenly starting their highly publicized protest with 'piracy is bad" if they don't actually believe it? Why aren't they telling a suddenly wider audience their real opinions on piracy? Where's the sincerity? You know, I'd like to link to a lot more examples of free culturists advocating these new business models - like Cory Doctorow telling publishers and writers we should thank Google for taking our work without permission - but so many of them have gone dark it's hard to find the examples I know are out there. How convenient.

Besides, there should be no "but" after the words "piracy is bad." At least not until something is actually done about it, until we stop aggregators like Google from scanning books without permission, or from making huge ad revenues on sites that profit from stolen movies and music. Otherwise we're just swimming in hypocrisy. Piracy is bad, but we're just going to keep profiting from it.

Oh, Wikipedia. Maybe you should just stay dark.

The case of Wikipedia is more disturbing still. If my kids are going to be using a free online encyclopedia to help them with their homework, I would really like that encyclopedia to be neutral to a fault, so that my kids can examine verifiable facts, and make up their own minds how they feel about things.

Wikipedia has worked so hard in the past to address concerns about biased, politically slanted entries on its site. By taking this public stand, and by essentially holding their primary audience (schoolkids) hostage, and using their influence to send young minds into a protest they might not fully understand, Wikipedia has abdicated its responsibility as an educational source. Tomorrow, when Wikipedia turns the lights back on, and folks look up SOPA and PIPA to find out what happened, does anyone believe there will be a balanced, unbiased Wikipedia entry on the subject? How unbelievably sad.

Don't even get me started on the Canadian academic sites that have gone black today.

If you're genuinely worried about the potential for censorship and a lack of due process in the SOPA and PIPA legislations, don't go dark, don't stop talking for a day. Let in the light, all the light, the righteous light that shines on both the real fears and the alarmist, made-up ones. Your silence is only helping those who profit from artist-destroying piracy hide behind a black screen of ignorance and deception.

Feel free to use my declaration at the top of this posting on your Twitter and Facebook status updates - free of charge.




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UPDATE: After considerable pressure on Facebook from a respected member of the CanLit community, I am including some relevant links here to information about SOPA and PIPA so you all can go and make up your own minds on it. Debating SOPA/PIPA was not my intent with this posting, but it seems to be the day for it, so here goes.

1. Apparently you can still reach the SOPA and PIPA pages on Wikipedia, though I've read them and I continue to worry about neutrality. Apparently you can still use Wikipedia if you quickly hit the ESC key before the blackout screen attacks (not sure how this is supposed to make me respect the blackout more, but there it is). The SOPA/PIPA pages are here and here. Most blacked out sites also have links to articles they think you should read. You can't discuss those articles on the blacked out sites, but you can go and read them.

2. In the comment section of the New York Times, a Wikipedia contributor has resigned, saying this (on his own Wikipedia page):

The blackout of the English Wikipedia destroys forever the concept of its political and geographic neutrality. It means rather than an open group of international contributors, uniting solely around their commitment to writing an encyclopedia, with nothing else implied, Wikipedia is, through what can only be described as an Internet moral panic, now associated with a particular political position in a particular nation. While many, possibly most, Wikipedians may happen to hold this political position in common, it ought to have been irrelevant to editing here. Now it is not; a precedent has been set and something important has died.

3. For more on the disingenuousness of much of the criticism of this legislation, I refer you here.

4. For an interesting take on the protest from a VIMEO video blogger who also happens to express her own opinions on piracy, see here.

5. For many links showing support for SOPA, go here.

To be clear, I only support legislation that contains due process. Lack of due process is a standard free-culture bomb to throw at most Internet regulatory proposals. No blackout protester has shown me a lack of due process in these bills, though the accusation is made.

real cultural damage, and the phantom kind

(Pratt Library at U of T - will copyright shut it down forever?)

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the free culture movement's habit of creating false problems having to do with copyright, using fake math in their attempts to discredit copyright, and imagining phantom damage to culture because of copyright. The latest contribution to the panic-fest can be found over at the centre of the Canadian free-cultureverse, michaelgeist.ca.

University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist is making one of his infamous calls for public outrage about the possibility, perhaps, maybe sometime in the future, that the government would consider, maybe, increasing the term of copyright from Life of the author + 50 years to the new international standard of Life of the author + 70 years. Judging by the good doctor's level of concern, such a change would likely mean the end of Canadian culture as we know it.

Geist lists a number of iconic Canadian writers (A.M. Klein, E.J. Pratt, Gabrielle Roy, Hugh Garner, etc.) and then claims that an extended copyright term on their work would have a significant impact on Canadian culture and history. He doesn't spell out exactly what that impact on Canadian culture would be, other than the fact that the works of these authors would continue to belong to their rights holders (generally the family members and heirs of the writers in question).

Just imagine... the sons, daughters and grandkids of important Canadian writers continuing to own the works their parents and grandparents bequeathed to them. It's like some sort of totalitarian nightmare, isn't it?

Geist goes on to claim that a term extension

"would have a dramatic negative effect on access to Canadian literature and history. Looking ahead, the likes of Margaret Laurence and Robertson Davies would be similarly delayed for 20 years."

Delayed? Delayed from what, exactly?

I did a quick search of every one of the authors mentioned in Geist's posting, all those who will soon feel this "dramatic negative effect" from having their copyright (maybe) extended. Every single author currently has books available through amazon.com, many in e-book editions. What's more, most if not all are also widely available through Canadian and international library collections. I can walk a block from where I'm writing this blog posting - to the E.J. Pratt Library at the University of Toronto (see above) - and almost certainly find original works by all of these authors and significant critical texts related to them. The suggestion that Canadian culture is about to be robbed, and Canadian citizens denied access to the works of these authors because of so insignificant a thing as a term-length for copyright is laughably absurd.

Who (if anyone) will suffer under an extended term?

Well, as I pointed out in an earlier posting, the folks most concerned about copyright terms and getting as many works outside of copyright as soon as possible are not the everyday consumers and culturally-minded Canadians Geist purports to speak for. No, those most looking forward to E.J. Pratt et al losing their copyright protection are the giant, multinational content aggregators like Google who want to suck up as much digitized content as possible without the hassle and bother of dealing with copyright licensing or permissions, so that they can continue to make gazillions of dollars selling advertising on top of other people's "free" content.

Real Cultural Damage

It should be noted here that Geist's blog posting looks quite different today than it did when he first published it on Monday. That's because many (though not all) of the spelling and grammar errors in the original posting have since been corrected (after prompting from me).

I wouldn't have bothered to help out, but the idea that Gabrielle Roy layed the foundation for the Quiet Revolution was just too disturbing to me. I know that Quebec Premier Jean Lesage was quite the looker, but is there any evidence to prompt such a scandalous assertion about him and Mme. Roy* from the heart of the University of Ottawa? This is just the kind of clumsy English-Canadian slight that could encourage another round of separatist activism.

These necessary corrections to Geist's writing are what the free culture folks call "crowd-sourcing." Crowd-sourcing means other people work so that Geist's words actually make some kind of sense on the page, and he continues to draw his impressive salary as a Canada Research Chair.

Now I ask you, what causes more actual damage to Canadian culture...

a multinational corporation like Google having to seek permission from (and perhaps pay royalties to) Canadian writers when it uses Canadian content in its privately-held, for-profit aggregation business; or a high-profile professor (at one of our most important universities) with questionable writing skills and/or an all too tenuous grasp on Canadian history?

As always, genuine, respectful, insightful comments and questions from real people continue to be welcome.

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* By the way, anyone wondering whether or not Gabrielle Roy will remain available to Canadians need only check out a Canadian $20 bill. Mme. Roy is quoted on our money, asking "could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?"


(Photo of E.J. Pratt Library sign courtesy me and my little camera.)

false problems and bourgeois tragedies

I took an early winter holiday to the great American northwest, enjoying lots of fog and espresso all along the Puget Sound and in downtown Seattle. As a result, I missed (blissfully, joyfully missed) most of the latest round in the ongoing Canadian copyright reform tussle, including a two day argument-marathon before the Supreme Court of Canada on December 6-7. I am really just now settling in to reacquaint myself with the issue.

Copyright? What's copyright?

Well, according to some in the growing field of quasi-legal populist theorizing, copyright is that inconvenient and potentially evil thing what stands between the innocent, interested student and her education.  Having been thoroughly schooled in his own various interventions at the Copyright Board (and the Supreme Court?), law professor Ariel Katz takes to his blog instead, continuing to insist that without a fair dealing category, broadly interpreted, education will be terribly hobbled and free speech assaulted in classrooms across our fair land.

In both Fair Dealing, Copyright and the Haggadah, and Access? Copyright! Professor Katz indulges in the classic free culture gambit of introducing a false problem and then claiming that only a substantial weakening of creator rights will solve that problem.

The False Problem

In his attempt to explain free culture through sacred text, Professor Katz insists that recent Copyright Board decisions would force teachers to treat students differently according to their individual levels of interest and ability to request information. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the reality of public education in Canada knows that teaching inconsistency and the importance of student engagement have been the norm forever and have nothing to do with copyright. Still, Katz tries to blame copyright and a too narrow interpretation of fair dealing.

It's an interesting approach, though fatally constructed on a fallacy... that being some mythical link between the ability to educate and the ability to obtain educational materials outside copyright licensing requirements. Free culture advocates love to paint copyright as an iron curtain that shuts out users and imprisons true creativity, but such an image has no relation to how our free and open society actually uses created materials.

Copyright cannot stop a teacher from teaching. It cannot stop a student from learning. If a teacher (or a school, or an educational industry) refuses to deal in good faith with copyright, pay reasonable license fees and compensate creators for their work, that is not something imposed on them, that is a choice they are making.

Katz repeats this logical misstep in Access? Copyright! where he also tries to show how copyright law will stifle free speech within the classroom. Defining the simple licensing requirements for educational use as a "veto power" over education, Katz presents the nightmare scenario of a teacher unable to discuss or criticize a newspaper op-ed because she cannot distribute free copies of that op-ed to her students.

"I can't have this thing because it's not free" is what my lovely wife calls a bourgeois tragedy. We should remove the rights of artists, other creators and a vital segment of Canada's cultural economy because a school refuses to license 30 copies of a newspaper op-ed for their students? Really?

At most, we're talking about $3.00 for this hypothetical lesson that somehow can't happen because of copyright. If our educational system cannot spend $3.00 to teach 30 students something important, we have far bigger problems than copyright to deal with.

To blame copyright for the refusal of educators to do their jobs within the law is so diabolically illogical it frightens me to think such an idea is housed at the University of Toronto (where Professor Katz teaches). U of T remains one of great institutions of learning in this country. It is my alma mater, and I'm extremely proud to say it is one of the universities in Canada that continues to deal in good faith with my copyright collective.


Stop in the Name of Love (and copyright)

Thankfully, there are the Supremes. Back in early December, Canada's Supreme Court justices had little patience for such weakly constructed arguments. From the very first submission in the recent SCC appeal hearing on a K-12 educational tariff, the Supremes were looking decidedly quizzical and concerned, wondering why educators would claim fair dealing for insubstantial copying, and forcing education's counsel to admit that tens of millions of dollars of substantial copying were actually in dispute.

After years of slippery rhetoric from those arguing against collective licensing of copyright-protected works in schools, I can tell you it was unbelievably refreshing to watch that particular spin crash to the floor of the Supreme Court.

You can see the full appeal arguments before the Supreme Court in this archived webcast - warning, not for those interested in actually being entertained; only the copyright-geekiest will enjoy.



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*(image of the Honourable Mr. Justice Marshall Rothstein courtesy the SCC webcast; image of fog in the beautiful trees of Puget Sound courtesy me and my little camera)