The Bitter SOPA*

The news has caused internet giants like the user-generated free encyclopedia Wikipedia to launch a symbolic protest by blacking out their services in order to explain the details of a law they oppose, SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act).

SOPA is a legislative project that the U.S. Congress has proposed along with the popular PIPA (Protect IP Act). SOPA is currently frozen in the House of Representatives. SOPA has been criticized by many Internet sites and businesses; these groups have registered their opposition in the form of posters, videos, and home pages directed at sinking the proposal. President Barack Obama himself has strongly declared that he will not support laws against Internet piracy if they promote censorship.

In essence, the aim of SOPA is to enable domain servers, search engines and Internet businesses in general to block servers that contain illegal content or that are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, regardless of the country the server is in.

The act causes massive unease, especially in the groups, businesses, users and artists that believe in the “share to create” philosophy developed alongside the growth in new digital technologies during this century. Examples of this philosophy abound, and although they form a type of counterculture they have managed to change the ways in which knowledge is dispersed. Some have achieved global fame. The DJ Girl Talk, a product of this computer revolution, is a visible face of the new philosophy. Girl Talk simply takes parts of other artist’s songs, mixes them, sticks them together, modifies the melodies over the rhythm, and finally turns out a different composition. In this small act of creation that is fed by the efforts of others resides the central concept of this new philosophy that opposes the dominant culture of intellectual property.

It sounds a bit ridiculous, but this alternative model of freely sharing knowledge has many defenders. For example, Howard Rheingold (a writer, artist, lecturer, and one of the biggest promoters of public knowledge construction) defends the position (which Jose Fernando Isaza illustrated very clearly yesterday on the pages of this newspaper) that communities do not advance due to the excessive competition of individual growth, but through loans and collective creations. I assume that he has acquired a notable boost with Internet creations. Theoreticians aren’t the only ones who defend this model; artists do as well. For example, Creative Commons provides a middle ground between a lack of protection for copyright and “rights reserved” that permits its users, in some cases, to freely create from someone who has left their work in the public domain.

It’s known that technology advances faster than the law. In this case, the legislators of the world could learn a little more about how entire knowledge communities and widespread cultural movements are created through the violation of some copyright laws. As some experts declared to this newspaper, the copyright laws and their regulatory methods should comply with the way of life in the 21st century. The cure cannot be based on the assumptions held over from the past century.

It’s obvious that we do not defend a “loose wheel” for content use. But we do support a response more adjusted to the realities of the digital world. At the same time, the facts susceptible to regulation in the tangible world should logically take on a different form in the virtual world of the Internet. In this terrain one has to know how to apply a significant public policy that does not imply censorship. Unfortunately the SOPA law is on that fine line between censorship and freedom of expression.

*Editor’s note: The title of this article is a pun in Spanish because “sopa” is the word for “soup.”