Blackout

When I went on Wikipedia today and saw that enormous back-lit 'W' standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the words: 'Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge', I nearly had a panic attack. I had wanted to look up Matt Damon's involvement in the 2008 financial crisis expose 'Inside Job'. Scuttling on over to IMDB to find absolutely nothing made me feel hollow inside.
I am not a lawyer (my bank account agrees). I have neither the time, inclination nor expertise to pour over the proposed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) bills in search of legal missteps, logical fallacies and unnecessary uses of the word 'hereby'. What follows is mere opinion. Mere as hell.

Sharing information is what people do. We are the only species capable of refining our communications to accurately refer to objects and ideas, and to be able to quickly clarify others' errors in understanding us. We are constantly driven to share, because what we stand to gain is almost unbelievably fantastic. Other people's lives and experiences enrich our own at every turn, whether from the neighbouring street or the neighbouring continent, and whether what they have to offer educates, energises or entertains us, we literally couldn't live without it. As millions of sub-Saharan Africans would tell you if they could, misinformation will kill you.

When new technology comes along that facilitates sharing to a higher degree, it's always going to be tempting for those who gained from the absence of that technology to encourage its prohibition. This is like trying to seal a dam with a cork, because technology will always evolve faster than the ability of anyone, no matter how rich, to mitigate the effects of its earlier stages. Was in in the interests of tribal councils, handsomely backed by bronze-smiths, to heavily tax iron-mines? You bet it was, and no doubt it put bread on a few dozen bronze-smiths' tables for a while. But in the end, everybody lost, because the neighboring tribe came and butchered them all with nice shiny iron. Because I'm ignorant, I had no idea, prior to writing this, whether the bronze or iron ages came first. Finding out took bloody ages. CAN YOU GUESS WHY?!

The SOPA bill proposes banning search engines (by which I mean Google), from including websites that include copyrighted content in search results. Unless they also plan on rigging everyone's homes with CCTV to monitor uses of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, I don't want to imagine how many millions of sites this would take off the banquet table of human productivity. The Chinese government doesn't ban Google searches relating to Tienanmen Square as a display of power. It knows that information changes minds. The absolute worst thing we could do in an era of economic crises, government spending cuts and University fees that seem to be actively seeking to produce a new aristocracy, is to limit the number of new ideas circulating in the minds of the youngest net-savvy generation.

Another insane proposal is to impose fines and a hefty jail sentence on those caught streaming unauthorised content ten times within a six month period. Firstly, if this were to come into effect in Britain, I could expect to lose 480 billion quid and serve 11 life sentences. Secondly, the very fact that they're aiming to make it illegal proves that they have absolutely no way of preventing it from happening. The technology has officially 'saturated'. It has been refined by the markets and by culture into a form that is so easily useable by everyone that it can no longer be controlled. Sorry Mr. Gates, but this is the price you pay for putting a personal computer in every home. This is the sound of progress.

The solution is not to imprison people, ruining their lives and the lives of their families, for taking advantage of something that is readily available to everyone. The solution is to change the game, implementing new systems of compensation for the creators of content that don't rely on people optionally making their lives less enjoyable for fear of imprisonment (see weed). The reason this doesn't, and arguably can't happen, is because the law-makers are beholden to the money-makers, and the money-makers have grown to such awesome stature that they can convincingly argue that the system belongs to them.

Let's take a step back though. Am I saying that stealing is OK? Absolutely not. Stealing is wrong; it always has been and it always will be. People's right to their own property is highly valued in our society, as it should be. Our possessions and productions are a part of who we are. The fruits of our labour feed us, as it were, and where theft is universally recognizable and can be be effectively combated, it should be. But the definition of which of our possessions can be stolen is going to shift, and with increasing speed in the coming decades. In years and cultures gone by, 'stealing' another man's wife was a crime punishable by death. Now, we acknowledge that a wife cannot, in fact, be stolen (not without chloroform, a length of duct-tape and an empty van anyway. Or so I hear...).

In the future, and make no mistake about this, people will transmit movies to each others' brains instantaneously via something which, from our 21st century perspective, is magic. Someone up there will try to have a piece of paper drawn up that says they'll have to go to jail. From the comfort of my own head, I will be staunchly arguing in the negative.

Note: In the above scenario, immortality is invented in about 2070. I take full advantage.