(Inevitable, isn't it?)

OK, so a few days ago I hadn't heard of this. (Why would I?) Wikipedia 
was threatening to shut down for a day, in protest of a law which might 
shut it down. (Isn't that like opposing lower motorway speed limits by 
driving really slowly? Weird...)

So for a day Wikipedia was gone. (Or rather, it appears, and then 
immediately vanishes.) QC had a big banner at the top. And XKCD was a 
petition as well.

So what's this all about then? Well, according to Wikipedia (who, 
remember, are protesting this), these are new laws intended to stop 
online content piracy. (This is comparable to passing a law to try to 
make water not wet any more.) Obviously I haven't read the actual text 
of the bills. (I wouldn't understand a word of it.) But according to the 
sources I've seen, there are a number of problems:

1. If any website contains greater than zero items of illegal content, 
it can be blacklisted.

2. Proof is not required. A media company merely needs to /claim/ that 
illegal content is present, and the site will be blacklisted. There is 
no requirement to notify the site, nor to prove anything in any court of 
law.

3. Once blacklisted, it's DNS records are required to be removed from 
all US servers. All US search engines are required to delist it. All US 
financial institutions are barred from interacting with it (most 
specifically payment processing and advertising services).

4. As far as I can tell, it is not possible to dispute the blacklisting 
or have it removed, ever.

In other words, these laws give media companies the power to arbitrarily 
remove any site from the Internet without any reason whatsoever. Or at 
least, to stop anyone in the USA accessing said website.

You can /kind of/ see where the authors were going with this... If a 
site is operated from outside the USA, you can't sue them. These bills 
make it possible to block them instead. It kinda makes sense.

[This assuming you're not cynical enough to suggest that they actually 
did all this on purpose and the "prevent piracy" thing is just a 
outright lie.]

The problem is that it seems to be laughably easy to blacklist 
something, absurdly hard for an innocent site to get itself off the 
blacklist, and lets not forget the best part: Any half-competent 
computer nerd can trivially circumvent the blacklist. So this is going 
to have *such* a big impact on piracy...



I almost wonder: Maybe they wrote a ridiculously over-the-top bill just 
to get everyone really outraged. And then they will write another, much 
less outrageous bill and everyone will quickly accept that because it's 
much better than the first one. Whereas if they'd produced that in the 
first place, nobody would have swallowed it.

It remains to be seen whether either of these things will pass. It seems 
to me that even if they do not, the likes of the MPAA and the RIAA will 
continue to produce more bills like these until one of them actually 
passes into law. It remains to be seen what effect if any a USA 
blacklist would have on the rest of the world.

While these bills look like very bad news, the way people like Wikipedia 
describe them could also perhaps be regarded as slightly over the top. I 
mean, not to claim that these laws are a good idea, but let's get some 
perspective here: If you don't use the Internet, these laws will have 
*no effect* on you. If they were planning to make it legal to lock 
Americans up without trial, *that* would be seriously disturbing. 
Censoring the Internet is merely worrying.



Perhaps more frightening than the bills is what I was on Failblog. A 
whole bunch of Twitter comments such as

"What the hell? Why is Wikipedia not working?!" (Um, it says why right 
there on the page?)

"OMG, how can we fix it?"

And, most worryingly,

"If Wikipedia is gone for good, there's no way I'll survive college."

Now, OK, this is Failblog. At least 95% of its content is fake anyway. 
Even if that last comment is real, the poster might have been joking.

But seriously. Are there really people so utterly dependent on Wikipedia 
that they cannot hope to complete their studies without it? WTF?! o_O

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