Opinion | Steal This Column (original) (raw)

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/opinion/steal-this-column.html

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Feb. 5, 2012

AMONG the wonders of the Internet, Wikipedia occupies a special place. From its birth 11 years ago it has professed, and has tried reasonably hard to practice, a kind of idealism that stands out in the vaguely, artificially countercultural ambience of Silicon Valley. Google’s informal corporate mantra — “Don’t Be Evil” — has become ever more cringe-making as the company pursues its world conquest. Though Bill Gates has applied his personal wealth to noble causes, nobody thinks of Microsoft as anything but a business. I marvel at Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his acolytes; but I marvel at their imagination and industry, not what the new multibillionaire described last week as their “social mission.” But Wikipedia, while it has grown something of a bureaucratic exoskeleton, remains at heart the most successful example of the public-service spirit of the wide-open Web: nonprofit, communitarian, comparatively transparent, free to use and copy, privacy-minded, neutral and civil.

Like many people, I was an early doubter that a volunteer-sourced encyclopedia could be trusted, but I’m a convert. Although I find errors (a spot check of the entries for myself and my father the other day found minor inaccuracies in both, which I easily corrected), I use it more than any other Web tool except my search engines, and because I value it, I donate to its NPR-style fund-raising campaign.

So as I followed the latest battle in the great sectarian war over the governing of the Internet — the attempt to curtail online piracy — I was startled to see that Wikipedia’s founder and philosopher, Jimmy Wales, who generally stays out of the political limelight, had assumed a higher profile as a combatant for the tech industry. He supplied an aura of credibility to a libertarian alliance that ranged from the money-farming Megatrons of Google to the hacker anarchists of Anonymous.

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Bill KellerCredit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Et tu, Jimmy?

For those of you who have not followed this subject — or who, like me, regard phrases like “Net neutrality” as Novocain for the brain — the latest skirmish concerns the rampant online theft of songs, films, books and other content. Separate bills advancing in the House and Senate would have given the government new tools to go after digital bootleggers. The central purpose of the legislation — rather lost in the rhetorical cross fire and press coverage — was to extend the copyright laws that already protect content creators in the U.S. to offshore havens where the most egregious pirates have set up shop. Like most people who make their living the way I do, I think parasite Web sites should be treated with the same contempt as people who pick pockets or boost cars.

But the legislation in question, drafted by the once-mighty entertainment industries, was vague and ham-handed, a case of overreach by Hollywood’s lobbyists. In the journalistic equivalent of taking a bullet for you, I read all 78 staggeringly dull pages of the House version, called SOPA. Interpreted in the most draconian way, it might have criminalized innocent sites and messed with the secure plumbing of the Internet itself. The partisans of an unfettered Internet saw their moment, and seized it. They unleashed a wave of protest that included much waving of the First Amendment and an attention-grabbing blackout of Wikipedia, the company’s most conspicuous foray into protest politics. The legislation is dead, and proponents of the open Web have shown that they are the new power in Washington.

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