The Philippine Online Chronicles

It’s been an exciting time for the internet. Last week, we talked about the then-current internet blackout, protesting the Stop Online Piracy act and the Protect IP Act, and how notable sites, such as Wikipedia and Google US, were openly opposing the act. All in all, well over 115,000 websites participated in the strike, sending a very clear message.

And the message was received.

On 20th January, the stance on the acts shifted: 19 US senators, eleven of whom were co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act, dropped their support of the act, and the two bills have been subsequently shelved, indefinitely.

This act of mass protest speaks of the very power of the internet as an entity. Wikipedia was arguably the driving force behind the word being spread, with the blackout message being read by over 162 million people. As a result, around 8 million people looked up their representatives, at Wikipedia’s suggestion. 4.5 million people signed Google's online petition calling for those in support to “End Piracy, Not Liberty”. Around three million tweets were about SOPA or the subsequent protests, and those are only the hash-tagged ones. Much credit also goes to Reddit, the prime organizer of the protest and the first site to confirm a blackout.

Many gaming and tech-related sites also protested SOPA. Destructoid, one of the leading gaming blogs, went dark for 24 hours, as did Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the go-to blog for PC gaming. Ars Technica, one of the oldest specialist sites on the internet, did not go black, but had a striking temporary site redesign, evoking socialist artwork, and covered the protest comprehensively. Nearly every tech website, from AOL to Amazon and various webcomics, demonstrated their condemnation of the two bills.

The message was clear: those who don't understand the Internet shouldn’t try manipulate it to their own ends. The Internet, often seen as a cesspool of idiocy, what with its fanboys and flame wars, lolcats and bronies, trolls and pundits all engaged in endless arguing, banded together to protect what was theirs. These bills, ostensibly created to combat piracy, are so vaguely worded as to be able to take any site down for something as insignificant as posting a copyrighted picture (something that the primary author of PIPA did himself). The Internet, with its role as aggregator and dissector of culture and society, would be utterly crippled. Even though the bill is US-based, SOPA and PIPA have the ability to block foreign websites, rendering the concept of a global, open network null and void.

Even without these two bills active, the US government was able to take down “rogue” website Megaupload and its various affiliate websites (most of them with a “Mega-” prefix). Kim Dotcom, the sites’ founder, was arrested in his home in New Zealand and the majority of his assets seized, on charges of conspiracy and money laundering. While copyrighted content is indeed freely available on Megaupload if you know where to look, the site was also the Internet’s most popular filelocker, with users uploading personal data for online backup and future access. As of this writing, Megaupload and its affiliate sites, such as Megacloud, are still down, cutting off its many users from their secondary and tertiary backups. And for those unfortunate enough to use Megaupload as their primary backup system, the loss of Megaupload may not be something they can recover from.

And the internet responded as well. Anonymous, the (in)famous activist group most popularly known for the PlayStation Network outage last year, launched their biggest attack yet following the Megaupload takedown, launching distributed denial of service attacks on the websites of the Universal Music Group (the company responsible for the lawsuit against Megaupload), the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Department of Justice, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America and Broadcast Music, Inc, crippling these websites temporarily. Incidentally, the non-governmental websites that Anonymous attacked are also the key supporters of SOPA and PIPA, and their actions can be confused for being directly related to the SOPA and PIPA protests, which may or not be the case. If they were also acts of anti-SOPA and PIPA protests, they can be easily used by those who support PIPA as counter-productive, as Anonymous are forcibly censoring sites themselves, something that those who are anti-SOPA are staunchly against. Conversely, the acts of protest last week were forms of self-censorship, demonstrating what the Internet would be like if those two acts were passed.

Hilariously, on the very same day that SOPA and PIPA were announced as indefinitely shelved, the news broke that various music and movie groups in the Philippines (the Philippine Association of the Record Industry,) want local legislators to create local versions of the above two acts. What with the Philippines often being a copycat of American law, this was a likelihood a week ago, but after the very tangible effect of the online protests, a local version isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, unless our politicians are up to being original.

Think for a minute of a Philippines without access to its copyrighted online content. No more kanto internet shops, no more “digital download” games in stalls at the mall, no more watching streaming TV episodes on YouTube. If our local legislation produced a like-for-like Philippine SOPA, reviews would be no more, as they have no choice but to talk about copyrighted material. Fan pages and the countless enthusiast blogs would be gone, and sites like this would be severely crippled, being unable to talk about, show, or even link to material that is copyrighted. There is already plenty of censorship in the Philippines, but the internet has always been free—more free, in fact, than most other countries; we can access any site we want, and our ISPs don’t really pay us any mind. (Except for the sites that have blocked our wonderful country specifically, naturally).

Imagine a Philippines without a free Internet. Hopefully, that’s something that we won’t let happen.

Photograph by Vincent Diamante under the Creative Commons license.