The day Wikipedia went down

If you tried to read the English-language Wikipedia last Wednesday, you couldn't. Every page was replaced with a black screen explaining that, as part of a protest, the content of the free online encyclopedia was being hidden for 24 hours. (A banner appeared at the top of Wikipedia's Spanish- and German-language pages, but this was hardly more distracting than the recent one which showed site owner Jimmy Wales dolefully asking for money.)

Wikipedia's blackout was supposed to be part of a larger action that would have rendered Google and Facebook unusable for an entire day as well. For a lot of people, that's already most of the internet — and that was exactly the point of the protest.

The reason for all this was that the two houses of the US Congress have each proposed a way to limit online piracy. Most pirated material is from the US, but is hosted on sites in Asia. It's not possible to shut those sites down, but it is possible to limit traffic to them. If users can't find the pirated material, they won't download it, and the market for it will go away. The same thing is done to cut off access to child pornography and to instructions for making bombs.

Could Google be shut down?

The proposal in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA) is to remove links from US sites to foreign sites that routinely violate copyright. So if Google, for example, offers a link to a Russian site that offers illegal music files, Google will have to take down the link. If it doesn't, Google could be fined or even shut down.

It sounds bad, but this is the kind of rule that YouTube has been following for some time now.

Not surprisingly, the copyright holders in the "old media" — the music and film industries — have been lobbying for exactly this kind of law. Those in the "new media" — including social-networking sites — are generally against it. They'd have to police not only their own content, but also vast amounts of user-supplied content.

What about free speech?

That's not their main reason for opposing it, though. They're using the C-word — censorship — to describe the possible effects. The whole philosophy of the internet has been one of a free and open exchange of ideas, they say. A law that allows the government to tell you what you can't say on the internet could open the door to a lot of other things. And if the US censors the internet, and tries to censor other countries, how is it being different from China, Iran and Syria?

Freedom of speech is one of the most powerful arguments in America. Just before Wednesday's protest, the White House said it was against the proposals. Just after the protest, several prominent senators changed their position, from being for PIPA to being against it.

The bills' opponents are reading a lot into the text. Both bills state that they are meant to combat websites that exist for the purpose of selling or distributing pirated material. Domestic sites that link to them cannot be taken down without warning; a court order is necessary. A reasonable attempt at removing the links is all that has to be made.

If there's a problem with SOPA and PIPA, it's in their vague language, not in their intent. The internet is no longer an unsettled frontier. Like the Wild West, it's being tamed and civilized. As one legislator said, "We need a law, just not this law."

One day without Wikipedia made the Congressional committees in charge of SOPA and PIPA aware of issues they might not have thought of. They've since decided to take more time and be more careful in formulating the proposed law. All sides have had their say, and that's what's important in a democracy.

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