Thomas Morton writes:
Politics is a game, a game that politicians are bred to play. I know this because, having spent several years helping fight stupid law making, I've seen all the tricks. And, boy, have we been played.
Dude, what am I? Chopped liver? I spent a huge part of my professional life as a Washington. What's more, I actually know Cary Sherman of RIAA. As in, I know him personally. We would recognize each other on the street. My headline should be obvious -- I don't think we we were played. Being effective in public-policy discussions is a learnable skill, it turns out. You learned it. Perhaps you will allow for the possibility I learned it too.
Of course the media companies are spinning this. The spin that Google really is evil after all was an obvious if unimaginative choice.
But rather than declare this to be Amateur Hour (r), can't you allow for the possibility that mass action got something right? Politicians didn't think internet mass action mattered. Now they think it does, and not just for fundraising or MoveOn or Tea Party campaigns. Copyright and technology policy in Washington has been deeply screwed up for some time. One path to fixing it it may be fine-tuning a phrase or excising it from a bad law. On the other hand, there was this guy named Martin Luther King who did not rule out mass action -- drew inspiration from, amazingly enough, a lawyer from India. Who know that lawyers could change public policy in a fundamental way, without playing an inside game? The "inside" is as much literal as figurative -- I'm talking about the Beltway, of course.)
Right now, best guess among policy experts is that SOPA and PIPA are dead for the rest of the (political) year. That is not nothing. That is something. And while preaching about the importance of Beltway politics is almost always helpful, one occasionally comes across some piece of writing that that has a foot in both worlds. I assume you didn't enjoy the analysis written by this guy -- http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/02/07/guest-blogger-sunlight-got-it-... -- but he actually seems to make in that very piece. the point you believe is so revelatory and breathtakingly iconoclastic. Maybe you would find the piece interesting if you gave it another read.
--Mike Godwin
My read on this is that we did accomplish something for all time. We established that we matter. "We" meaning the larger we, not wikipedia google or any player, but the real body politic.
SOPA & PIPA are not dead, but they are in the long grass. ACTA it appears is going the same way (hopefully) because the European Union now includes countries who in living memory have experienced what it means for ones life to be controlled by nameless bureaucrats. The mass uprisings against ACTA in those countries reminded the Germans of their slightly less recent past, and that may or may not be able to tilt the balance.
We need to keep a keen eye on all three, and do what we can to finally tilt ACTA decisively over.
The law where we can do most good though, right now, is OPEN. We need not wait on events to unfold. Today we should focus on educating people that it is not a better written, more moderate law than SOPA or PIPA, but is in fact much worse, more draconian. Educate people about its flaws, and tell them to keep an eye on their legislators, so that if they make even the slightest move to make OPEN a reality, they will hear from somebody. And it will be those same people who got the lawmakers attention the last time. We.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org