SOPA Vote Put Off for Now, but what Happens the Day Atlas Really Shrugs

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The black page of Wikipedia on January 18 when it shut down for 24 hours.

In my high school days, I read a book called Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand’s bestseller, which, for some time, made me a rebel without a cause. Just like many others. Over the years, much of what I read has faded. But I remember it talked about all the brains in a country uniting to finally shut down everything. I also vaguely remember the end of the book talking about something like New York plunging into darkness because the crippled power system in the city shuts down as the protagonist’s plane takes off.

The all-black homepage of Wikipedia on January 18 instantly reminded me of Atlas Shrugged. The message on the page was equally profound: Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge.

And it’s not over yet. As the Wikipedia page keeps flashing the warning: “We are not done yet.”

And, Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are not dead too.

The US Senate and House of Representatives on Friday have only put the controversial Bills on hold for the time being. Lamar Smith , chairman of the House Judiciary committee, was quoted on Friday by cnet.com saying he expected the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act to resume sometime next month. “We must take action to stop” online piracy and counterfeiting, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, thundered after the postponement.

“They are waiting in the shadows… We’re turning the lights back on. Help us keep them shining brightly.” This is Wikipedia’s appeal after it turned on the site after the 24-hour blackout on January 19.

Now, there could be a dichotomy here. After all, Atlas Shrugged was about individual aspirations and creativity — what we could call in modern parlance Intellectual Property Rights. The very thing that the two controversial US Bills aim to protect.

Interesting. But then why are Internet sites — ranging from Google to Wikipedia protesting the Bills? Why is every creative faculty within our society — from writers to publishers to filmmakers to musicians — protesting too? Who are these Bills supposed to serve?

“It’s Hollywood against the tech world, in effect,” columnist James Barraford, who writes about social media for MediaTapper.com, was quoted as saying.

So there is no rocket science here. This is not about copyrights or intellectual property rights. Just like Atlas Shrugged, this is about individual creations and freedom, and the government serving a particular interest group in the name of greater good.

While the Bills have widespread support from content owners (or shall we brand them content distributors from the last century?) — Hollywood and music studios who are concerned that online piracy damages their businesses — technology giants have claimed they will amount to nothing but censorship.

“The mismatch between Silicon Valley and Congress isn’t just that Silicon Valley isn’t engaged enough with lobbying Congress, but that Silicon Valley has this outmoded idea that your ideas succeed when they are right, as proven in the marketplace, rather than because you were better at making a backdoor deal than the next guy,” says Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, one of the biggest publishing houses of the US.

Now, why would O’Reilly oppose a Bill that claims to protect his business interests?

Because, as Lance Ulanoff, editor-in-chief of Mashable.com, a leading American news website and Internet news blog, says, SOPA will take us back to the dark ages. Ulanoff, while accepting that real content piracy remains a persistent and daunting problem for companies and creators, points out “the language in SOPA is so irrational that I can only assume that the authors and backers wanted nothing more than to fundamentally change the rules of the web: to shut down the open post fields, kill reposting (goodbye, Tumblr), end shared videos (sorry, YouTube), expand the definition of what it means to infringe (sorry, Twitter, no sharing links that aren’t yours).”

And, as O’Reilly points out, “the motion picture industry has a history of opposing every new technology, even those that proved ultimately to grow the market”.

So, we are back to Ayn Rand’s page about individual excellence and creativity versus backdoor dealmakers.

As January 18 showed, a partial shutting down of the virtual world set off a frenzy in the US (which faced the maximum shutdowns) and other places across the world (thanks to the Wikipedia strike).

“We want(ed) to give people a visceral example of what would happen when content is blocked,” Rob Beschizza, managing editor of Boing Boing, one of the largest tech/science news/opinion blogs in the world, was quoted as saying.

“Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tweeted on Tuesday before shutting down the site for 24 hours.

Yes, I have had editors thundering again and again that Wikipedia was not the gospel and shouldn’t be substituted for encyclopedias or “genuine” sources. But for all its shortcomings, can you imagine a world without Wikipedia now? And what happens when Google shuts down even for a day? And what if Facebook and wordpress.com join in? What if Twitter and Reddit and the scores of others also decide to throw their hat in the ring?

What happens when the Internet shuts down? What happens, when, as John Galt says in Atlas Shrugged, they “stop the motor of the world”?

What if, just as in Atlas Shrugged, these people try to demonstrate that a world in which the individual is not free to create is doomed? That a civilisation cannot exist where every person is a slave to society and government?

What happens when Atlas really shrugs?

Imagine a world without free knowledge…