Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

January 06, 2012

I've been a bit distracted lately by the controversy over my favorite Hasidic rapper Matisyahu shaving off his beard, and Cee Lo Green's rewriting the words to John Lennon's "Imagine," so you'll have to forgive me for waiting so long to wade into the brouhaha over the Stop Online Piracy Act.

What Is SOPA?

The legislation, introduced in Congress in October by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-TX, and a dozen co-sponsors, usually is known by its acronym, SOPA, which to me sounds a bit too much like a mind-altering substance that citizens of a future society rely upon to sustain their addled ennui in an Aldous Huxley novel. SOPA's supporters -- most notably, various media conglomerates, credit card companies and business trade groups, according to this list from the House Judiciary Committee's website -- tout it as a necessity for what they see as the growing menace of counterfeit products and pirated movies and music on the Web. In a nutshell, SOPA essentially would empower the U.S. Attorney General, at the behest of U.S. companies, to seek court orders that would force Internet service providers and search engines to block access to foreign websites accused of intellectual piracy. (The original version of the bill went even further, giving the AG the power to go after U.S.-based sites as well.)

As Smith himself argued at a Nov. 16 hearing:

The theft of America's intellectual property costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs. Under current law, rogue sites that profit from selling pirated goods are often out of the reach of U.S. law enforcement agencies and operate without consequences. The Stop Online Piracy Act helps stop the flow of revenue to rogue websites and ensures that the profits from American innovations go to American innovators.

Hacktivists Converge

In contrast, a growing legion of critics -- ranging from Google co-founder Sergei Brin and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to the Guy Fawkes mask-wearing hacktivists of Anonymous -- SOPA would wreak havoc and possibly even destroy the Internet as we know it, in order to protect the profits of a few. As one SOPA opponent, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, countered:

Rather, those of us who value the Internet's growing role in our society recognize that any government intervention in the online ecosystem that is the Internet can and will have a ripple effect on more than just its bad actors. Interfering in the Domain Name System (DNS) for example would undermine the net's structure and harm cybersecurity efforts. Authorizing a private right of action, for example, wouldn't just allow rights holders to use the courts to protect their intellectual property. Companies could also abuse such authority to protect out-dated business models by quashing new innovations in their infancy and discouraging less than complimentary speech. In other words, the wrong approach to combating infringement could fundamentally change the Internet as we know it, moving us towards a world where transactions are less secure, ideas are less accessible and starting a website wouldn't be an option for anyone who couldn't afford a lawyer.

As a writer who has yet to receive a cent from any of those myriad offshore websites who've taken it upon themselves to, ah, "repurpose" my articles over the years, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the plight of a Hollywood mogul who conceivably might have to opt for a $150,000 Maserati GranTurismo instead of the $2.4 million Bugatti Veyron that he's been dreaming of, just because Torrent monkeys chose to download his latest flick instead of shelling out $8 to see it at a multiplex. In reality, though, movie pirates tend to have little interest in Harry Crowne, Mars Needs Moms or other flicks that have trouble drawing audiences. Instead, they're mostly skimming a few percent of the gross from must-see blockbusters that nevertheless generate ungodly amounts of revenue. Case in point: The single most pirated movie of all time, Avatar, which has been downloaded illegally an estimated 21 million times since its release in 2009, somehow still managed to rake in $2.8 billion at the box office worldwide, according to this recent Hollywood Reporter article. When you factor in additional revenue DVD sales, cable TV and legitimate online downloads, I don't think the movie's investors and talent took much of a hit to the wallet.

But even some people who accept Smith's argument that intellectual property piracy is a serious economic problem worry that SOPA could someday morph into a tool for political repression. It is a bit chilling when you realize that the existing template for having ISPs and search engines block certain Web addresses is the Chinese Ministry of Public Security's Web censorship system, better known as the "Great Firewall of China," which also filters packet transmissions in search of any information deemed politically objectionable. (Chinese writer Han Han recently wrote in jest that the Chinese nominees to Time's list of the 100 most influential people of 2011 included "sensitive word, sensitive word and sensitive word.") It's not just ACLU-card-carrying lefties who are worried that the same thing could happen here. As Matt, a blogger at Conservative Hideout, opines:

The idea is simple: when the government grants itself power of some sort, it is only a matter of time before it is abused. As for SOPA, I can, one day, seeing it used against sites opposed to the government, or it's [sic] current ideology. I can see a liberal judge reading something into it that isn't in the actual text of the legislation. I can see it being expanded by future Congresses to encompass things that it was never intended to regulate. In other words, if the government grants itself a power, it isn't a question of if it will be abused, it is a question of when.

But there's another possible outcome from SOPA, a genie that the U.S. government and the media industry may want to think twice about before letting it out of the bottle. BBC News reports that a consortium of hackers are even threatening to secede from the Internet as we know it and create their own alternative Internet. The plan, which surfaced at a recent hacktivist conference in Germany, involves putting a large network of small satellites -- some less than a pound in weight -- into orbit and using them to bounce signals to an even bigger number of DIY relay stations that users would set up on Earth. As hacktivist Nick Farr, one of those who conceived the plan, told BBC News:

The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let's take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities.

A Lawless Alternative Internet

The creation of a lawless alternative Internet isn't as far-fetched as it sounds, now that the Russians and other countries are offering space on their rockets to whoever has the cash, and private space launch companies with low-cost reusable vehicles are on the horizon. (I was surprised to learn that a company called Interorbital Systems is offering to put a small ham radio communications satellite into orbit for you as little as $8,000.) As the BBC News article noted, there are some technical hurdles that the hacktivists would have to overcome. To utilize such a network for continuous Internet communication rather than intermittent, ham radio-style bursts, the satellites probably would have to be put in geostationary orbits above the equator, so that they would seem to be motionless from the ground. But that also would mean orbiting at a higher altitude, which might cause the signal to have an inconvenient delay in reaching relay stations back on Earth. (As this 2009 Popular Mechanics article explains, users of existing satellite-based ISPs, who usually are in rural areas without broadband access, can browse the Web and download files and email, but bandwidth-hungry apps such as streaming live video and online games don't work very well.) In 2008, Japanese scientists launched Kizuna, a $340 million communications satellite that was touted as being the first step in creating an orbital ISP capable of 1.2 gigabyte speeds, but I haven't been able to find any information on the progress of that project.

Assuming the smart guys find a way to overcome those obstacles, though, they might be able to create an alternative, anarchistic Internet that could thwart government attempts to control what users read, see or do online. That would not only render SOPA moot, but it might also enable people in China, North Korea and other repressive nations to get news, communicate and organize on a revolutionary scale. Of course, a totally unfettered alternative Internet might also enable shady characters to disseminate child porn, propaganda advocating racist violence or genocide, or instructions to terrorist groups on how to build weapons of mass destruction. It's worth noting that when the infamous P2P file-sharing site Pirate Bay recently started Bayfiles, a legal cyberlocker service, they explicitly banned the sort of stuff I'm talking about. Maybe we need some limits.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below. And while you're doing it, listen to one of my fave songs from a few years back, Le Tigre's "Get Off the Internet."