SOPA blackouts begin as MPAA calls foul – Jason Deans

It’s Wednesday morning, and if you’ve done much more than visit ExtremeTech straightaway, you’ve probably noticed the blackouts, protests, and informational postings about SOPA at a number of sites. Wikipedia, Reddit, Google, and Scribd are distributing information or blacked out altogether to protest the Stop Internet Piracy Act and educate people on what it would mean for the US if it passes.

Some might call these protests a great example of grass roots democracy in action. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) calls them a “gimmick… designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals.”

Current MPAA president and thirty-year senator Chris Dodd further blasts the blackout as a stunt that punishes the users of the aforementioned services or turns them “into corporate pawns.” He decries the decision to protest as “an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today” and claims that online information services are “intentionally skew[ing] the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.”

There are times in this job when irony and ignorance fuse together to form a black hole of stupidity that no journalist, however highbrow, can escape. This is one of those times. Here we have the president of an organization notorious for buying campaign votes declaring that Wikipedia and Reddit users are in the pockets of huge corporate interests.

Pause and consider that a moment.

Reddit has been described as “4chan with a condom.” It’s a social networking site, news aggregator, and supreme source of both useful information and hours of wasted time. It’s owned by the publisher Conde Nast (the only pirates CN ever supported were the glossy full-page spreads of Johnny Depp and the crew of the Black Pearl). It’s awful hard to dupe a website’s community into supporting you when the average BS detector is turned up to 11.

Wikipedia’s protest, on the other hand, was “orchestrated” by Jimmy Wales — a man whose best idea for getting people to donate money was to force them to stare at pictures of him for months on end. It’s true that the debate over whether or not Wikipedia should shut down for SOPA was heated at times, and there are users and editors of long standing who disagree with the decision — but no one who goes by the tagline “Jimbo” runs around practicing corporate subterfuge. Everything Jimmy knows about subterfuge is neatly encapsulated in the meme on the right — which probably came from Reddit.

Dodd’s railing against the right of communities to assemble and make their voices heard is standard operating procedure for a paid shill who isn’t getting what he wants, but it’s sad to see this level of vitriol from a man who supposedly spent 30 years representing the people of his state (Connecticut, incidentally). Instead of being able to see these actions as a referendum on the way SOPA attempts to prevent piracy, Dodd can only see corporate goons skulking in the shadows. We’re not sure where this idea that Google makes its money on the backs of piracy came from, but it’s not helping the actual debate on preventing piracy and content theft.

Need to access Wikipedia today? Read our story on how to avoid the blackout.

This entry was posted on 18/01/2012 (Wednesday) at 6:45 am and is filed under Computing, Conde Nast, E-PARASITE, Internet, Reddit, SOPA, governments, mpaa, pipa, piracy, protect ip, riaa, society, software, wikipedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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