I was a guest today on the Liberty Underground Radio Show on the 1787 Radio Network, discussing IP for about 25 minutes. The reason they invited me on was the hosts, in discussing SOPA and PIPA in the Dec. 31, 2011 show (hour 1, starting about 10 minutes in), had a dispute about IP. Although the main host questioning me was on the fence about IP, he was open-minded, fair, and civil, and I think he moved a bit in the anti-IP direction by the end.

The show has a podcast (feed) and my segment was on the second hour, starting at about 25:25 (audio).

[From my Webnote series]

[Update:

• see related discussion in “Libertarianism After Fifty Years: What Have We Learned?” (ch. 25 in Legal Foundations of a Free Society), p. 681.
• Chapter 16 of LFFS: “Introduction” to J. Neil Schulman’s Origitent
• It’s A Fucking Disgrace that the Libertarian Party Platform Does Not Condemn “Intellectual Property” (Patent and Copyright)
• Grok conversation]

In Masnick on the Horrible PROTECT IP Act: The Coming IPolice State, I noted some insane excesses of patent and copyright (like the precursor to SOPA), and wrote:

I believe in days past, say, before the Internet, IP was bad but it was not even in the top 20 or 30 of harmful state policies. But nowadays I believe it is in the top six most evil and harmful state laws, institutions, and policies:

• war;
• the Fed/central banking/fiat money;
• government schools;
• taxation;
• the drug war;
• intellectual property.

IP is extremely insidious because, unlike the drug war, tax, or war, it is held out as a type of property right. Thus, in its name, the state can spy, fine, and jail, or even enlist private citizens to enforce these laws on their own behalf, as mini-state agents. Truly, we are becoming an IPolice State.

And if we divide them out, copyright, I am now convinced, is significantly worse than patent, for reasons given in Patent vs. Copyright: Which is Worse?:¹

Over the years I have vacillated on this issue. But I am becoming convinced that copyright is worse than patent, for the following reasons:

Length. The patent term is about 17 years, while copyright usually lasts over 100 years (life of author plus 70 years).

Trends. Copyright law keeps getting worse,² while patent law has been basically the same for a while now, and in fact has slightly improved–in recent years it’s more difficult to get injunctions; and the recent patent reform law, the America Invents Act, actually added a general prior commercial user defense, the first significant legislative improvement to patent law … ever.³

Taxation versus Censorship, the Police State, and Regulation of the Internet. The patent system imposes costs of at least $100 billion a year, by reducing innovation and competition.⁴ So it basically acts like a tax. It’s bad, it impoverishes us, it slows things down. But it’s just another tax.

The copyright system, by contrast, besides imposing untold billions of cost on the economy, consumers, and artistic creation, and distorting the entire domain of creative works, is also being used as an excuse by the state to increase its surveillance, warrantless searches and seizures, punitive bans of people from the Internet without due process, censorship, cutting off websites accused of piracy, and control and regulation of the Internet and related technologies. As the Internet is one of the most significant tools ever to emerge to help people battle the state and communicate and learn and spread ideas, this is very chilling. In the name of stopping copyright piracy, the state is trying to squash mankind’s greatest anti-state weapon.⁵ Taxes are bad, but killing or restricting the Internet is just horrible. Copyright is worse.

And in light of recent events–Revised ‘Net censorship bill requires search engines to block sites, too, British student Richard O’Dwyer can be extradited to US for having website with links to pirated movies, Copyright and the End of Internet Freedom, the threat posed by SOPA, Man sentenced to federal prison for uploading “Wolverine” movie, the Supreme Court ruling (on the day of the SOPA blackout “victory”) that Congress has the power to take public domain works and subject them again to copyright, and the Department of Justice’s/FBI’s shutting down of MegaUpload.com and arresting four of its personnel IN NEW ZEALAND, without the use of SOPA/PIPA (as noted inAnti-SOPA “victory”? The fight is not over: Courts and Justice Dept Give us the finger)–I’m thinking we need to move IP a notch or two up the list.

1. [I go back and forth. I now think patent is worse because it does more actual harm to the human race, but copyright is also harmful because it threatens Internet freedom, one of our most powerful tools to fight the state.] [↩]
2. The Ominous PROTECT IP Act and the End of Internet Freedom; Masnick on the Horrible PROTECT IP Act: The Coming IPolice State; ACTA, Executive Agreements, and the Bricker Amendment; As Countries Sign ACTA, Many Finally Admit Their Copyright Laws Will Need To Change; US, EU, Canada, Japan, Australia & Others To Sign ACTA This Weekend, Despite Legal Concerns; SOPA and Section 1201: A Frightening Combination. [↩]
3. The American Invents Act and Patent Reform: The Good, the Meh, and the Ugly. [↩]
4. Costs of the Patent System Revisited. [↩]
5. Copyright bill revives Internet ‘death penalty’; The Ominous PROTECT IP Act and the End of Internet Freedom; Masnick on the Horrible PROTECT IP Act: The Coming IPolice State; ACTA, Executive Agreements, and the Bricker Amendment; As Countries Sign ACTA, Many Finally Admit Their Copyright Laws Will Need To Change; US, EU, Canada, Japan, Australia & Others To Sign ACTA This Weekend, Despite Legal Concerns; SOPA and Section 1201: A Frightening Combination. [↩]

From Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

The Internet Wins: PIPA & SOPA Delayed

from the there-we-go dept

The writing has been on the wall for a long, long time, but now it’s finally official. Harry Reid has announced that he will not move forward with PIPA and Lamar Smith has announced the same thing about SOPA. Both are listed as “delayed” and there’s always a chance that they will come back in some form (potentially even nastier), but hopefully those on Capitol Hill have learned a big lesson about trying to mess with the internet… and what happens when you cut backroom deals to help one industry at the expense of the public.

Mike Masnick has this interesting post up today at Techdirt:

Crowd Cheers Loudly As All Four GOP Candidates Say No To SOPA/PIPA

from the national-issue dept

It really was just a few weeks ago that a Hollywood lobbyist laughed at me (literally) when I suggested that SOPA/PIPA might become a national issue during the Presidential campaign. As he noted, copyright issues just aren’t interesting outside of a small group of people. My, how things have changed. After this week’s protests made front pages and top stories everywhere, it’s not all that surprising that the candidates at the latest GOP debate were asked their opinion of the bills… and all four came out against them. Of course, this seems to fit with the new GOP positioning that they’re the anti-SOPA/PIPA party (so sorry Lamar Smith…). Mediaite has the video:

Read more>>

Masnick quotes each of the four candidates’ responses to the question. I provide them below, with “translations” provided by my friend Daniel Coleman for the three statist candidates:

Gingrich: “You are asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood? I am weighing it and thinking fondly of the many left wing people that I am so eager to protect. On the other hand, you have so many people that are technologically advanced such as Google and You Tube and Facebook that say this is totally going to mess up the Internet. The bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable. I believe in freedom and think that we have a patent office, copyright law and if a company believes it has generally been infringed upon it has the right to sue. But the idea that we have the government start preemptively start censoring the Internet and corporations’ economic interest is exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Translation: I joke about using power to hurt people who disagree with me on policy. But seriously, folks, this bill got way too unpopular for me to be able to support it. I think you need the powers of this bill vested differently so that it won’t cause as much of an outrage.

Romney: “The law as written is far too expansive, far too intrusive and far too threatening of freedom of speech and information carried across the Internet. It would have a depressing impact on one of the fastest growing industries in America. I care deeply about intellectual content going across the Internet and if we can find a way to very narrowly go after those people who are pirating especially those offshore. But a very broad law that gives the government the power to start saying who can pass what to whom, I say no and I am standing for freedom.”

Translation: I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. But once this whole to-do about SOPA has had its 15 minutes of fame in the media, slightly reword the act and I’ll support it.

Paul: “I am one of the first Republicans to oppose this law and so glad that sentiment has mellowed up here as Republicans have been on the wrong side of this issue and this is a good example on why its good to have someone who can look at civil liberties … freedom and the Constitution bring people together.”

Santorum: “I do not support this law and believe it goes too far. But I will not agree with everyone that there isn’t something that should be done to protect the intellectual content of people. The internet is not a free zone where anyone can do anything they want to do and trample the rights of other people. Particularly when we are talking about entities off shore. The idea that the government has no role to protect the intellectual property of this company, that’s not right. The idea that anything goes on the Internet? Who has that idea. Property rights should be respected.”

Translation: I basically don’t have a problem with this law, but it would be suicide to admit it. I mean, people have way too much freedom online: do you know what people are saying my name means on the internet?

Santorum was the worst and creepiest. He is bugged by freedom and the Internet. As Masnick said:

Santorum’s answer is the weakest, obviously — and isn’t too surprising. Just recently he made a statement that was about how online activity should be regulated.

But, really the most interesting part of what happened was not the candidates answering the question, but the audience’s response. When John King asked the question and gave a brief explanation of SOPA/PIPA… he also mentioned that CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, supported the bill… and the crowd booed loudly. When the candidates — particularly Gingrich and Paul — made their claims, the crowd cheered loudly.

Update: here is Santorum apparently endorsing SOPA or something like it, and regulation of the Internet and restriction of Internet freedom in the name of child pornography and piracy.

[TLS]

From LewRockwell.com:

Salman Khan on SOPA and PIPA

The heroic founder of Khan Academy–“learn almost anything for free”–explains these two State power grabs on behalf of corporatist pressure groups. (Thanks to Steve Bartin)

Update/Related post: Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?

***

The civil libertarian and Internet-lovers are celebrating a temporary quasi-victory of sorts in the wake of the blow we delivered to the proponents of censorship, control, censorship, and abrogation of property rights, with the successful anti-about SOPA/PIPA/copyright Internet blackouts and protest campaign that culminated yesterday.

But I imagine the goons at the RIAA and MPAA are snickering right now. Because they know they don’t really need SOPA. Current copyright law, aided by the DMCA, ICE seizures, and so on are bad enough.¹ My guess is these fascists figured they would try for SOPA and if it snuck in, more to the better; and if not, they could adopt the pose that current regulations are reasonable and just barely enough. But under current copyright and DMCA law and associated enforcing agents of the federal thugs,  the Obama administration has seized websites to censor Wikileaks; Immigrations and and Custom Enforcement (ICE) has seized hundreds of domains in the name of stopping piracy and at the behest of the MPAA, in addition to other ICE domain seizures in the name of stopping child pornography (“Operation Protect Our Children“–What do you mean “our,” kemosabe?). An innocent hip-hop site was shut down for a year by ICE in the name of IP. Jammie Thomas and thousands of college students have been persecuted. Copyright has been used by private companies like Carrier IQ in censorship attempts–and in actual censorship, such as banning books and burning movies (literally: no hyperbole). The average Internet user already has potentially $4.5 billion—yes billion—in damages per year, for normal Internet use. That ain’t enough for these Big Content parasites?

On the day of the tech community’s “victory” over SOPA–yesterday–the Supreme Court ruled that Congress has the power to take public domain works and subject them again to copyright. And today, a mere day later, the Department of Justice (sic) has given us the middle finger, by having the FBI shut down MegaUpload.com, one of the world’s most popular file-sharing websites, and now proceeding to arrest four of its personnel behind it …. IN NEW ZEALAND (!) … in a global crackdown against the suspected online pirates (as noted in the DemandProgress alert pasted below) (see also Mike Masnick’s post DOJ Gives Its Opinion On SOPA By Unilaterally Shutting Down ‘Foreign Rogue Site’ Megaupload… Without SOPA/PIPA). And just the other day, a court ruled that British student Richard O’Dwyer can be extradited to US for having website with links to pirated movies. So what does the RIAA and MPAA need SOPA for? Copyright law is already horribly oppressive. Sure, they’ll keep turning the screw to put more pressure on free people who are not sufficiently under their control. But they already have a fascist boot on our throats. We cannot let up on them. We must eradicate copyright.

Here’s the DemandProgress alert:

Fight Back: Government Shuts Down MegaUpload

Unbelievable: After history’s largest online protest, the U.S. Government nonchalantly responds with the middle finger. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The FBI shut down Thursday one of the world’s most popular file-sharing websites, MegaUpload.com, and announced the arrest of four of the people behind it in a global crackdown against the suspected online pirates.

Here — check it out: If SOPA and PIPA pass it’ll just broaden the government’s power to do things like this: MegaUpload.com. (And make it ILLEGAL for us to link to sites that are seized — like we just did in the last sentence.)

As MegaUpload’s website notes — er… noted: 

The fact is that the vast majority of mega’s Internet traffic is legitimate, and we are here to stay. If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue.

This is what we’re up against.  Please tell President Obama and your lawmakers to put an end to it. NOW.

Just fill out the form at right to tell Obama and your lawmakers to stop messing with the Net!

	If you’re already on Facebook, click here to share with your friends.
	If you’re already on Twitter, click here to tweet about the campaign: Tweet

1. For more on copyright related ICE seizures under the Obama administration, see Down with Gatekeepers: Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration vs. Internet Freedom. [↩]

In this article on PCMagazine, 11 PCMag staffers were asked for their take on SOPA. The response was almost universally negative, although most unfortunately first prefaced their opposition to SOPA by saying IP piracy “is of course a real problem”. For example:

• “Yes, theft of intellectual property is wrong, but it shouldn’t be protected at the cost of free speech and an open Internet.”
• “SOPA is a perfect case of a disproportionate reaction to a real problem. Lawless Web sites full of pirated content are a real problem, but breaking the Internet isn’t the solution.”
• “This proposed legislation is akin to having libraries monitored or even shut down because there is a chance that a book may contain a piece of plagiarized work.” [Note: typical confusion, usually spread by the IP proponents. Copyright infringement has nothing to do with plagiarism. Plagiarizing Plato is just stupid, not copyright infringement (unless Congress yanks it out of the public domain); and selling or obtaining a “pirated” copy of Mission Impossible 3 is not plagiarism.]
• “IP is a precious thing. For example, every writer on PCMag has had their work pirated at one time or another. However, this legislation goes” too far. [Note: how does the fact that someone has copied your writing show that “IP is a precious thing”? The “for example” is bad writing, sloppy thinking, and does not illustrate or support his contentions at all.]
• “There is definitely a need for content owners like movie studios and music labels to protect their content from piracy, but the proposed legislation isn’t the answer.”

This was also the tack taken by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, which said that

“rogue foreign sites that pirate American intellectual property or sell counterfeit goods pose significant problems for our economy,” but PIPA and SOPA “are not the right solution to this problem, because of the collateral damage they would cause to the Internet.”

Why does Facebook blithely accept the unproven assertion that piracy harms the economy? Cato’s Julian Sanchez has debunked this nonsense.¹ Sigh.

As I’ll discuss in a separate post,² the problem is that all these people undercut their opposition to SOPA and censorship in the name of IP, by acknowledging the importance of copyright and IP, by condemning piracy. It is admirable that they are taking the ride side of the chasm caused by their cognitive dissonance, but dissonance it is. If you support copyright, you oppose piracy, and you support the state’s existence and its attempts to enforce these “property rights.” You cannot have both copyright, and Internet freedom/freedom of speech. The threat here to property rights, to individual rights, to Internet freedom and freedom of speech and expression and the press comes from copyright itself. We must strike at the root. SOPA is just a symptom of the disease. The disease is copyright. Everyone is trying to treat the symptom–enforcement efforts like SOPA–with half-hearted treatments like labeling the response “disproportionate” or going “too far.” This is like trying to treat a brain tumor by taking Tylenol–sorry, acetaminophen–in response to the headaches caused by the tumor. All opponents of SOPA and censorship, all denizens of the web and proponents of freedom, must oppose copyright itself (and patent too).

Anyway, I said “almost” above. The one holdout among PCMag staffers was John Dvorak, who

Most analysts will tell you that either of these two bills could kill the Internet as we know it. But Wikipedia’s protest and other blackouts will not solve anything. The only effective measure to take—unless you love these laws—is to directly target the supporters and co-sponsors of the bills. For more, see The Right Way to Protest SOPA.

In his linked editorial, he added:

Wikipedia’s protest and other blackouts will not solve anything. They are a total inconvenience to users who may want to use the service. What is accomplished? People will get mad at Wikipedia rather than mad at the specific Congressmen who promoted these bills.

Dvorak is smart, he is skeptical of IP, he has a libertarian streak, and I like him. But what is he smoking? Did people get mad at Wikipedia? It was a community decision! People love them for this. And it was one of the most amazingly effective and crucially important protests of our time, maybe of all time. How else were we supposed to get the attention of the demonic, evil Congresscritters in favor of these evil bills, except by waking up the people so they would rattle their cages? And now they are running scared–over a dozen Congressmen have come out against the bill or dropped their co-sponsorship of them (19 at last count). These assholes are running scared–and good. Would it have happened without the blackouts? Of course not.

The blackouts were good. They were heroic. They sent seismic shock waves through history. But the battle is not over yet. And the only true solution is to abolish the abomination that is copyright.

1. See also [citation needed] from SOPA, PROTECT IP Advocates, Cato Daily Podcast (Jan. 18, 2012), featuring Julian Sanchez. Good interview even though Sanchez seems to concede that piracy is a problem and a “criminal” activity. [↩]
2. Forthcoming. [↩]

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged–which had a working title of The Strike–was about the men of the mind, the producers, going on strike against an increasingly oppressive and ungrateful government and society. They withdrew their services to show the world who really needs whom.

And this is essentially what happened in yesterday’s Internet blackouts and other protests against SOPA and PIPA by tech, Internet, and Silicon Valley giants such as Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and so on. And since SOPA and PIPA are just attempts to enforce copyright, the strike was essentially against copyright. Which is ironic, since Rand was completely in favor of patent and copyright, going so far as to maintain that “patents are the heart and core of property rights, with her followers saying that “all property is intellectual property”. And yet she would have admired the tech titans. Presumably she’d have been very horrified to see her heroes stage a mini-Atlas Shrugged strike–against copyright! The question is: would she have sued them for copyright infringement?

C4SIF is pleased to announce that Sheldon Richman has joined the Center’s Advisory Board. A long-time libertarian thinker and writer, Mr. Richman is Editor of The Freeman (Foundation for Economic Education), a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, and the author of Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families. Some of his IP-related publications may be found  on the Center’s Resources page, to-wit:

• “Patent Nonsense,” The American Conservative (Jan. 1, 2012);
• “Slave Labor and Intellectual Property: On a misplaced analogy,” The Freeman Online (June 3, 2011); and
• “Intellectual ‘Property’ Versus Real Property: What Are Copyrights and What Do They Mean for Liberty?,” The Freeman (June 12, 2009), which I discussed here.

It’s timely to reprint this, in the wake of SOPA protests:

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow <[email protected]>

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. [continue reading…]

I’ve been alerted to the fact that several of yesterday’s SOPA blackout pages had links to the audio book version(narrated by Jock Coats) of my book Against Intellectual Property, such as the site for Mars Explorer.

Sheldon Richman has a really fantastic, concise, well-written and tightly reasoned essay in The American Conservative explaining why intellectual property — patent and copyright — is illegitimate, and “enforces a monopoly over the mind.” From the Jan. 1, 2012 issue:

Patent Nonsense

Intellectual property enforces a monopoly over the mind.By Sheldon Richman | January 18, 2012

Staunch advocates of private property might be expected to support “intellectual property rights”—patents and copyrights—but these days that expectation is more than likely to be wrong. IP has come in for a thrashing from libertarians, among others, in the last few years, and it may be all over but the funeral.

The issue can be viewed from three vantage points: moral, economic, and political. The pro-IP lobby tends to conflate the first two, moving back and forth between assertions about justice and economic incentives. Their case is something of a moving target, so let’s break it down.

The moral claim is that an inventor has an exclusive, enforceable right to his useful, novel application of an idea, while an author or composer has such a right to his original work or expression. IP specialists insist that what is owned is not an idea per se, but it’s hard to make sense of that assertion since an application or expression of an idea is itself an idea. IP really is about the ownership of ideas, and therein lies the problem.

Why should an inventor or author have an exclusive right, whether in perpetuity or for a finite period? Ayn Rand, the late novelist-philosopher who vigorously defended intellectual property, replied, “Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind. Every type of productive work involves a combination of mental and physical effort…” Patent and copyright laws “protect the mind’s contribution in its purest form.” In this view, all property is ultimately intellectual property. As the 19th-century free-market anarchist Lysander Spooner wrote, an individual’s “right of property, in ideas, is intrinsically the same as, and stands on identically the same grounds with his right of property in material things … no distinction of principle, exists between the two cases.” (Not all 19th- and 20th-century libertarians agreed—a notable counterexample being the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, who thought patents were a pillar of plutocracy.)

Read more>>

Great post by Jeff Tucker over at Whiskey and Gunpowder (what a great name for a pro-liberty blog) about the recent Internet blackouts and other protests against SOPA and PIPA. One interesting point Jeff makes is:

And who and what started all of this? Strikingly and notably, it was the “conservatives” — or even the “libertarians” — who continued to be oddly confused by the whole topic. It was the “civil libertarians” and people associated with what is commonly called the “left” that became the machine behind the protest. This is a beautiful demonstration that you never really know for sure where to find the true friends of liberty.

Most libertarians that paid attention or spoke out about this eventually joined the opposition to SOPA and PIPA, but many of them somewhat reluctantly, from a pro-IP perspective where they favor copyright and oppose piracy, but think these laws just go “too far.” They are left “balancing” free speech rights against intellectual “property” rights, like some confused, unprincipled, pragmatic statist. An exception to this would be the left-libertarians, and the Austro-libertarians, who oppose copyright on principle.

In any case, here’s Tucker’s post:

***

Protesting Government Digitally

By Jeffrey Tucker Jan 18th, 2012

There’s been a long debate over digital technology. Does it help or harm the cause of liberty, individualism and human rights? People who say it has hurt point out that government has been able to use the products of private innovation for its own purposes. The government can watch us as never before. It assembles data on the population as never before. It can spy, intimidate, tax, regulate, control trade and even inflate ever more efficiently using the tools of the digital age.

All of this is true. But what Black Wednesday demonstrated is exactly the opposite point. Major parts of the Web withdrew their consent in protest against legislation in Congress that would have a devastating effect on how the Internet functions. Instead of being a sanctuary from power and control in which information is freely produced and distributed, it would become a delivery system for government/corporate-approved content not unlike the radio of 1930s or the television of the 1950s.

This legislation would transform our lives. The Internet declared its opposition with conviction. The institutions rose up by posting blackout notices, banner ads and messages of open defiance. It was a peaceful protest not unlike those of the past, but with a gigantic difference. Instead of being limited by geography and, therefore, easily ignored or broken up by police, the digital protest was global, impossible to ignore and could not be stopped. It applied to the English-speaking world, but all language groups become involved because the effects of the legislation would be truly universal.

It is always a risky venture to stand up to power. You face loss of commercial traffic. You face the possibility of reprisal, even violence. You face the real possibility of losing the fight and, therefore, not being declared a hero, but rather a fool. And if we look at the sweep of history, we can easily see that the odds of winning against power are extremely low. Liberty is a rarity in history for a reason. Despotism has ruled the day in most times and most places. People who chose to fight the power have to begin with this understanding.

It is only when a few people of conviction stand up to power and their protest is backed by some level of public consensus that the difference is made. It has happened rarely, but look at the effects. The liberty won through withdrawing consent built the modern world. Everything we use to better our lives is a product of this liberty. Our health, education, material prosperity, arts, faith, music and philanthropy all owe their greatest debt to liberty, not to government.

A convenient marker to signal the beginning of the digital age is the invention and popularization of the Web browser in 1995 — at least this is the way I tend to think of it. That means that we’ve had 17 years of seeing what free information flows can produce, and it is nothing short of astounding. We take it all for granted day to day, but when you step back to look, the transformation seems like miracle.

Anyone can communicate in real-time video at a near-zero price with anyone else in the world. At our fingertips, we have all the world’s great literature, music, poetry and science. It is the key to our social networks, to educational efforts, to healing and cooking and every other life activity you can think of. And it all traces to that amazing thing: the ability to share and exchange ideas in whatever form.

Most of the time, people take for granted the products of freedom once they come into being and never stop to imagine an alternative. People go about their daily lives enjoying amazing blessings unaware of what made them possible, and they do not imagine a world in which it could all be taken away.

Even today, in former socialist countries, the young generation has little appreciation of the fact that only a generation ago, the shelves were empty and the life was grim and without hope. In the U.S., we just expect and anticipate — almost as a human right — the newest digital toys, the latest upgrades, the ever-more bug-free environment of software lives. We saunter around stores and pick and choose from among the world’s bounty and think nothing of it.

This is a serious problem because liberty requires awareness of its blessing to survive. Somehow, and against all odds, the debate over the technical details of the enforcement of intellectual property has sparked some degree of awareness. The protest has been cast as one against censorship, and it is indeed that. It is good to think about the counterfactual reality of a world of information gone dark.

But actually, there is more at stake than that. Information is the essential building block of what we call civilization, of all the things that improve the human condition. It is about more than what we can see and what we can read; it is about the human right to share and exchange ideas that makes progress itself possible.

The anti-SOPA movement has been one of the most exciting protests I’ve seen in my life. It seemingly came from nowhere. It was built over the course of just a couple of months. The tipping point came when Wikipedia announced that it would join the protest. Then it seemed like everyone got involved, and over the course of just a few days. Programmers wrote applications to block out websites. Millions changed their Facebook profile pictures (hey, it’s a lot easier than a hunger strike!). Congress was flooded with messages of opposition as never before.

And who and what started all of this? Strikingly and notably, it was the “conservatives” — or even the “libertarians” — who continued to be oddly confused by the whole topic. It was the “civil libertarians” and people associated with what is commonly called the “left” that became the machine behind the protest. This is a beautiful demonstration that you never really know for sure where to find the true friends of liberty.

People have asked for my speculations on the future of this legislation. My guess is that this protest will effectively kill the current versions of the bills in Congress. They will be tabled, and the corporate interest groups pushing them will quiet down. Then in the summer and fall, it will all start up again with less-objectionable legislation that claims to remove the offending powers, but, in reality, does largely the same. Will the protesters sit this one out, or will they see that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty? In the end, the freedom of the Internet can be guaranteed, not just by stopping new legislation, but by repealing old legislation. In this respect, this protest represents not an end, but a beginning.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker
Executive editor,
Laissez Faire Books