First Battle of SOPA/PIPA

The First Battle of SOPA/PIPA was the culmination of two months of skirmishing between protestors and corporate interests. The fight for freedom versus control is a back-and-forth that has existed as long as the internet itself, but it came to a head after the proposal of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). This Battle led directly to the Battle of MegaUpload, which was initially a major retaliatory strike by forces controlled by the corporate interests behind SOPA/PIPA.

November 2011
On November 16, 2011, Tumblr, Mozilla, Techdirt, the Centre for Democracy and Technology, plus thosuands of toher Internet companies participated in American Cnesorship Day and protested agaisnt SOPA and PIPA. Their site logos were covered by black banners that said "STOP CENSORSHIP". Google's site linked an online petition, and claims to have gathered 7 million signatures fromt he United States alone.

Incidentally, also on November 16, 2011, at the House Judiciary Committee Hearing, observers noted a total lack of technological understanding among the members of the House. One by one, the witnesses—including a lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America—said they weren't qualified to discuss... DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions). Adam Thierer, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Centre, similarly said, "The techno-ignorance of Congress was on full display. Member after member admitted that they really didn't have any idea what impact SOPA's regulatory provisions would have on the DNS, online security, or much of anything else.

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, stated, "The significant potential harms of this bill are reflected by the extraordinary coalition arrayed against it. Concerns about SOPA have been raised by Tea Partiers, progressives, computer scientists, human rights advocates, venture capitalists, law professors, independent musicians, and many more. Unfortunately, these voices were not heard at today's hearing."

An editorial in Fortune wrote, "This is just another case of Congress doing the bidding of powerful lobbyists—in this case, Hollywood and the music industry, among others. It would be downright mundane if the legislation weren't so draconian and the rhetoric surrounding it weren't so transparently pandering."

For more information, please see Wikipedia's Stop Online Piracy Act: Legislative History. Suffice it to say, if this was a sitcom, the audience would either be gaping in sheer astonishment, screaming in horror, or laughing their collective asses off at the lack of knowledge displayed by Congress. Unfortunately, this is not a sitcom and therefore no laughing matter.

December 2011
On December 10, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales drew attention to SOPA, which was far worse than the Italian Wiretapping Bill that had been grilling in that country for years. That had been a great campaign including the First Battle of Italy This attention would eventually lead to consensus that Wikipedia had to participate in the protests or perish if SOPA/PIPA should pass. Unfortunately, the Peoples of the Free World played right into the hands of the corporate interests (Dictators) by swallowing the bait of SOPA and PIPA, whereas the true threat, ACTA, was not in the limelight.

On December 22, 2011, Reddit users proposed a boycott of the biggest ICANN-certified registrar (Domain Name registrar i.e. administrator) in the world, Go Daddy, a boycott which had the date set to December 29, 2011. Cheezburger stated it would remove over 1000 domains from Go Daddy if they continued to support SOPA. Wikipedia and others protested similarly. Go Daddy withdrew its SOPA support on December 23, stating "Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."CEO Warren Adelman stated when asked, that he couldn’t commit to changing Go Daddy's position on the record in Congress, but said "I’ll take that back to our legislative guys, but I agree that’s an important step". When pressed, he said "We’re going to step back and let others take leadership roles." Notably, many Internet sites would be subject to shutdowns under SOPA, but GoDaddy is in a narrow class of exempted businesses that would have immunity, where many other domain operators would not.

Nonetheless, as punishment, on December 26, 2011, a Google bomb was started, by someone the Resistance does not no but would commend for their effective effort, against Go Daddy to remove them from the #1 place on Google for the term "Domain Registration" in retaliation for supporting SOPA. This was then disseminated through Hacker News. The Resistance, though it did not exist at that time, would like to note that by December 22, 2011, SOPA supporters were discovering the backlash that could arise from ignoring social media users and the same customers or voters they were trying to stamp down and attract at the same time. Reports up to December 29 described Go Daddy as "hemorrhaging" customers. On December 25, 2011 (Christmas Day), Go Daddy lost a net 16,191 domains as a result of the boycott. However, on December 29 itself, Go Daddy gained a net of 20,748 domains, twice as many as it lost that day, attributed by Techdirt to a number of causes, in particular customers having moved early, and an appeased customer response to their change of position over SOPA.

Early January 2012
In January 2012, Reddit announced plans for a twelve-hour blackout on January 18, company co-founder planned to testify to Congress "He's of the firm position that SOPA could potentially 'obliterate' the entire tech industry" Paul Tassi wrote in Forbes. Tassi also believed that Google and Facebook would have to join the blackout to reach a sufficiently broad audience. Other major sites planning to participate were Cheezburger sites, Mojang, Major League Gaming, Boing Boing, BoardGameGeek, XKCD, SMBC and The Oatmeal.

Wider protests were considered and in some cases enacted by many other major sites... so much so that on January 17 a Republican aide on Capitol Hill said that the protests were making their mark, with SOPA now "a dirty word beyond anything you can imagine". So profound was the reaction garnered from the public by SOPA and PIPA that in Moscow, there was a protest at the US Embassy, well, a series of protests involving picket lines, two picketers were arrested for their participation.

The Corporations Strike Back (Or try to)
An executive of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) dubbed the blackout plan an example of the "gimmicks and distortion" that inflamed passions while failing to solve the problem of copyright infringement by "draw[ing] people away from trying to resolve what is a real problem, which is that foreigners continue to steal the hard work of Americans". Former U.S. Senator and MPAA Director Chris Dodd stated that the coordinated shutdown was "also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today." Apparently, using one's freedoms is abusing them...

The sponsor of the bill, Representative Lamar S. Smith, called the blackout a "publicity stunt," and stated with reference to Wikipedia that "it is ironic a website dedicated to providing information is spreading misinformation about the Stop Online Piracy Act." Truly ironically, he is failing to thank the Peoples of the Free World for saving his ass, becasue at the time his own webpage used a copyrighted image as its background, without at least giving credit. Technically, he was using it for non-profit purposes and would typically not be persecuted under surrent law as long as he cited his sources. Did he? NO. He would be a criminal under SOPA, if not for his position of power granting him immunity.

Notably, PIPA's main sponsor in the Senate, Patrick Leahy, got 905,310$ from SOPA supporter and 416,250$ from PIP supporter corporations as "campaign funding" i.e. bribe money. No data is currently available on how much Lamar Smith was paid for his SOPA proposal. For a more thorough list of bribe money recievers and amounts, please refer to 2011-2012 US Congress Bribes.

On January 17, 2012, in response to growing concerns over PIPA and SOPA, the White House stated that it "will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet." This rather dampened the corporate back-lash by dumpign a bucket of cold water over their heads. It seemed that contrary to popular belief, the White House does listen to its voters... for the 12 months before the next election, and only for those 12 months.

A Date That Will Live In Ignorance
The struggle for freedom reached a feverish pitch on January 18, 2012 as at midnight Eastern Time English Wikipedia, along with 30 other sister projects, blacked out their websites. According to him:

Free speech includes the right to not speak. We are a community of volunteers. We have written this thing that we believe to be a gift to the world. We don't charge people for it. It's freely available to anybody who wants to (use it). We are a charity. And I think it's important for people to realize that the ability of our community to come together and give this kind of gift to the world depends on a certain legal infrastructure that makes it possible for people to share knowledge freely -- that the First Amendment is incredibly important in terms of the creation of this kind of thing.

The overwhelmingly vast majority (well over 95%) of those polled supported the protest once it was explained to them. 115,000 other websites also protested by altering their front pages, shuttign down entirely, or the like. 4chan and Flickr "censored" images, Wired magazine's website put black bars over most of their text with Javascript, bars which could be removed via a mouse click, Mozilla altered the default start page of their Firefox browser, and the League of Gamers circulated a video against the E3 Convention.

162 million visits to the blacked-out Wikipedia were registered over the 24 hours, with at least 8 million uses of the front page to look up Congress members. Senator Ron Wyden, a key opponent of both bills, said that 14 million plus people, at least 10 million voters, had contacted their Congressmen to express their disagreement with the proposed laws. Time Magazine reported that before the day had ended, "the political dominoes began to fall ... then trickle turned into flood". It named ten senators who had announced their switch to opposing the bills and stated that "nearly twice that many House members" had done so.

University libraries took advantage of this event to remind students that they could read paper just as well as monitors, a commendable cause witht he dark days of ACTA looming, unnoticed, on the horizon. CTV labelled the day "A date that will live in ignorance"

The Aftermath
For the Wikipedia article and details, see Wikipedia: Protests against SOPA and PIPA: Post-protest.

People who knew nothing about the web but the fact that they wanted to dominate it were soundly trounced in all aspects by the courageous people and websites of, by and for the free world. Most sources proclaimed it a coming of age for the tech industry and the Internet as a whole. The media outlets the ignorant corporations and politicians tried to buy out or they themselves (Fox News) were known to have made statements to the effect that the will of the people was being used as cyber-bullying. We would like to point out that people expressing their political beliefs is fully legal under the US Constitution and that upon last inspection it was their bribery that was illegal. Chris Dodd, CEO of the MPAA, stated that the White House should not expect funding from Hollywood should they shelf SOPA/PIPA.

Among other media industry reactions, Creative America, a media industry association, argued that "They've misidentified this issue as an issue about your Internet, your Internet is being jeopardized. In fact their business model is being asked to be subjected to regulation. They're misleading their huge base." This is them telling Hollywood that it's wrong to think it's the Internet's problem, in fact, it's Hollywood's ways that are being asked to be subjected to regulation and they just don't want to change.

Rep. Lamar Smith (Texas-R), who sponsored SOPA, flatly stated in a commentary on FOX News (Fox News) that "This bill does not threaten the Internet. But it does threaten the profits generated by foreign criminals who target the U.S. market and willfully steal intellectual property by trafficking in counterfeit or pirated goods." While speaking on the Senate floor on January 23 Senator Leahy reiterated his objections to the protests, saying "Websites like Wikipedia and YouTube... would not be subject to the provisions of the bill. That Wikipedia and some other websites decided to “go dark” on January 18 was their choice, self imposed and was not caused by the legislation and could not be. It was disappointing that sites linked to descriptions of this legislation that were misleading and one-sided. The Internet should be a place for discussion, for all to be heard and for different points of view to be expressed. That is how truth emerges and democracy is served. Last week, however, many were subjected to false and incendiary charges and sloganeering designed to inflame emotions." We would like to point out that the First World countries are the biggest arms dealers of the world, and it trafficks the guns through middlemen to the Third World regularly, while willfully taking raw resoures produced in those countries to fun their enormous and unsustainable consumptive habits.

World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee "scathingl" attacked the SOPA and PIPA legislation. Speaking at an industry event in Florida he praised the protests by major sites for the attention they had drawn, and described the bills as a "grave threat to the openness of the internet" that "had to be stopped":
 * "The laws have been put together to allow an industry body to ask the government to turn off a web site and the government can make people turn off the site without trial ... There are times when that could be very powerful and damaging, like before an election and it is crossing a line and we have to protect the internet as an open space, we have to respect it."

Two days later, Vice-President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for the Digital Adenda Neelie Kroes described the bills as "bad legislation" that would "threaten the basic foundation of the success of the web". She also said there "should be safeguarding benefits of open net." "Speeding is illegal too but you don't put speed bumps on the motorway,” she said. Ironically, the European Commission would soon sign ACTA for all of Europe and had pariticpated in its negotiations. Surely, this woman was as overjoyed that the world was so distracted by SOPA and PIPA that it failed to see the puppet master of ACTA

The Conflict Escalates
Mere hours after the ends of the protests, the hastily-assembled real counterattack by the odious Corporate Interests and Dictators was ready to go. They launched the Battle of MegaUpload. New Zealand had no treaty obligations, no grievance with Megaupload, but the United States of America used the opportunity to reassert its dominance in the Pacific Ocean, particularly the South Pacific, and went on the offensive. The world changed forever as the Dictators shut down Megaupload without warning or investigation, behaving as the attack dogs of the Corporations and nothing more.