World without Wiki

Wikipedia’s decision to take a stand against US anti-piracy legislation has brought criticism from some of its own editors, who think such action threatens the site’s credibility and neutrality, says Mike Liedtke

CAN the world live without Wikipedia for a day? The shutdown of one of the internet’s most-visited sites is not sitting well with some of its volunteer editors, who say the protest of US anti-piracy legislation could threaten their credibility of their work.

“My main concern is that it puts the organisation in the role of advocacy, and that’s a slippery slope,” said editor Robert Lawton, a Michigan computer consultant who would prefer that the encyclopedia stick to being a neutral repository of knowledge. “Before we know it, we’re blacked out because we want to save the whales.”

Wikipedia’s English-language site shut down for 24 hours in protest. Instead of encyclopedia articles, visitors to the site saw a stark black-and-white page with the message: “Imagine a world without free knowledge.” It carried a link to information about the two congressional bills and details about how to reach lawmakers.

It is the first time the English site has been blacked out. Wikipedia’s Italian site came down once briefly in protest at an internet censorship bill put forward by the Berlusconi government. The bill did not advance.

The shutdown adds to a growing body of critics who are speaking out against the legislation. But some editors are so uneasy with the move that they have blacked out their user profiles or resigned their administrative rights on the site to protest. Some likened the site’s decision to fighting censorship with censorship.

One of the site’s own “five pillars” of conduct says that Wikipedia “is written from a neutral point of view”. The site strives to “avoid advocacy, and we characterise information and issues rather than debate them”.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales argues that the site can maintain neutrality in content even as it takes public positions on issues.

“The encyclopedia will always be neutral,” he said. “The community need not be, not when the encyclopedia is threatened.”

Wales said the right approach to fighting piracy is to follow the money.

“Go after the people who are engaging in large-scale criminal enterprises rather than burdening the entire internet with a regime that doesn’t have very much promise of working.

“Innovations like Wikipedia would become very difficult if it were necessary for us to police everything that users were doing against some blacklist of websites.”

The Wikimedia Foundation, which administers the site, announced the blackout on Monday after polling its community of volunteer contributors and editors and getting responses from 1,800 of them. The protest is aimed at the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act under consideration in the US.

“If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States,” the foundation said.

Both bills are designed to crack down on sales of pirated American products overseas, and they have the support of the film and music industry. Among the opponents are many internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, eBay and AOL. They say the bills would hurt the industry and infringe on free-speech rights.

Social news website Reddit also shutdown for 12 hours on Wednesday, but most companies are staying up. Google said it will display its opposition to the bill on its home page in some fashion.

Dick Costollo, CEO of Twitter, said he opposes the legislation as well, but shutting down the service was out of the question.

“Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish,” Costollo said.

Since Wikimedia depends on volunteers, it is concerned about a lack of exemptions in the bills for sites where users might contribute copyrighted content. Today, it has no obligation under US law except removing that content if a copyright holder complains. But, under the House version, it could be shut down unless it polices its pages.

Michael O’Leary, senior executive vice-president of global policy and external affairs with the Motion Picture Association of America, said there is a growing problem that entertainment and technology companies face across the world: rogue websites that profit from stolen content and counterfeit goods.

“Many countries have taken reasonable measures to target this activity. Intellectual property laws have allowed commerce, innovation and free speech to flourish on the internet,” he said.

“In the United States, criminal websites located in other countries are engaging in destructive behaviour but are currently beyond the reach of our courts and law enforcement agencies. So there should be nothing controversial about taking measures to limit the access of these foreign rogue websites — that engage in behaviour that is illegal for domestic websites — to American consumers and the American market.

“The bills will encourage innovation while preserving millions of jobs that depend on intellectual property protection, including about 2.2 million Americans whose jobs depend on the film and television industries,” he said.

However, he said, opponents have resorted to attacking the legislation without engaging in a real discussion of its provisions.

“Hopefully, this is not a stalling tactic to avoid targeting these foreign rogue websites and the profits they create for American companies that facilitate their illegal behaviour,” he said.

The White House raised concerns over the weekend, pledging to work with Congress to battle piracy and counterfeiting while defending free expression, privacy and innovation online. The administration signalled it might use its veto power.

That the bill seems unlikely to pass is another reason Lawton opposes the blackout.

“I think there are far more important things for the organisation to focus aside from legislation that isn’t likely to pass anyway,” he said.

Danny Chia, another contributor to the site, said he had mixed feelings about the blackout. The neutrality applies to the content, but many interpret it as being about the site as a whole, said the software engineer.

In an online discussion, others raised the same point about the blackout: appearances matter, and if the audience sees Wikipedia taking a stand, it might not believe the articles are objective, either.

Wikipedia has seen active editor numbers fall from a peak of 100,000 a year ago to about 90,000 now. Wikimedia Foundation blames this mainly on outdated editing tools, and believes it can get the number growing with software upgrades.

Proposed legislation

The Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) is the bill being considered by the US House of Representatives.

The Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) is the parallel bill being considered by the US Senate.

The proposed legislation is designed to tackle online piracy, with particular emphasis on illegal copies of films and other forms of media hosted on foreign servers.

The bills propose that anyone found guilty of streaming copyrighted content without permission 10 or more times within six months should face up to five years in jail.

The US government and rights holders would have the right to seek court orders against any site accused of “enabling or facilitating” piracy. This could theoretically involve an entire website being shut down because it contains a link to a suspect site.

US-based internet service providers, payment processors and advertisers would be outlawed from doing business with alleged copyright infringers. Sopa also calls for search engines to remove infringing sites from their results — Pipa does not include this provision.

The bills would also outlaw sites from containing information about how to access blocked sites.

The bills originally demanded that internet service providers block users from being able to access suspect sites using a technique called Domain Name System (DNS) blocking.

This would effectively make them “disappear” from the internet — and is a process already used in China and Iran. However, after opponents claimed this could disrupt the internet’s underlying architecture, the chief sponsor of each bill agreed to ditch the measure.

To protect sites against false claims of illegal activity, Sopa proposes penalising copyright holders who knowingly misrepresent a site’s activity — however, Pipa does not contain this safeguard.

Both bills offer immunity to ISPs that block access to websites if they have “credible evidence” that the third party’s pages contain unsanctioned copyright material. Critics claim this could create a conflict of interest as it may encourage firms to block access to competitors’ sites. It could also encourage firms to take a “safety first” approach resulting in users being prevented from viewing legal material.

Sopa’s supporters are trying to reach consensus on the bill before putting it to a vote in the House of Representatives, which suggests that any vote may be some way off.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid plans to put Pipa up for a vote in the upper house on January 24.

Supporters of the bills include television networks, music publishers, movie industry bodies, book publishers and manufacturers.

Critics include Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo, eBay, LinkedIn, AOL and Zynga.

— BBC