The Bruce Report

Apparently, the largest encyclopedia in human history, the venerable and omniscient Wikipedia, never heard of the escape button located in the upper left quadrant of the more than four billion keyboards currently in use all over the the world.

If it had, its long-gone Wednesday “blackout” of its site to “raise awareness” and protest pending legislation by U.S. Congress, which it says “could fatally damage the free and open Internet,” might have worked.

As it was, I obtained access to the online tome – when I should have been denied entry – simply by pecking “esc” repeatedly before the splash page loaded fully. Within seconds, all four million articles lay waiting for my perusal.

Indeed, I used this “workaround” to determine what the compendium, itself, says about workarounds. To wit: “A bypass of a recognized problem in a system. . .typically a temporary fix that implies that a genuine solution is needed. . .brittle in that they will not respond well to further pressure from a system beyond the original design.”

Yeah, sure. Wiki wishes.

But my real point is that I am, by no one’s definition, a code maker. Hell, I can’t change the ribbon in a standard typewriter. (Remember that old-fangled contraption? Ask your grandfather).

Still, after 20 years of cruising the Internet for fun and profit, even I know how to break a block activated by simple JavaScript. And if didn’t, I could have found out easily enough just by trolling other antechambers of cyberspace.

“You can still use the site by creating a new Ad Blocking Rule in Adblock Plus,” one geek helpfully advises.

“You only really need to block the JavaSript,” another assures. “NoScript does the job as well.”

In fact, Wikipedia’s somewhat lackluster gatekeeping is an object lesson for all who seek to control the flow, disposition and use of Internet content, including, ironically,  those who the encyclopedia and other providers and browsers now oppose: A few Republican politicians and their friends in the entertainment industry who want to punish or shut down online thieves of copyrighted material (mostly, movies and music).

In the crosshairs are two bills introduced before Congress last year – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) – that would give content owners the legal tools with which to choke off business to sites they claim infringe on their rights. The targets of their ire are, for the time being, foreign pirates, which are not subject to U.S. law.

So far, so good. As a so-called creative worker myself, my bank account rises and falls by the number of times I can persuade a client to pay for what I happen to be thinking on any particular day.

But, as in so many contentious cases, the devil is in the details. The proposed legislation recognizes that its grasp is effectively limited by its reach in overseas markets. To solve the problem, it requires U.S.-based providers and browsers (like Wikipedia, Facebook, Reddit, Yahoo, Flikr and the almighty Google) to “play ball” and censor its worldwide connections on demand and without judicial oversight.

Or, as one online source explains: “If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of ‘The Dark Knight’, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull ads and finances from it and – most dangerously – that the site’s Internet Service Provider prevent people from even going there.”

Hence, Wikipedia’s decision to protest this week by “going black” for 24 hours.

Yet, the larger and more important question is: What makes anyone think that either SOPA or PIPA, as they are currently configured, will actually work any better than Wiki’s brownout did?

The proposed Acts are ludicrously blunt instruments that are far more likely to damage the myopic lawmakers who now support them than a “free and open Internet.”

Beyond this, they are virtually unenforceable, and any law that can’t be enforced gets what it deserves: It gets ignored as tens-of-thousands of online denizens operate their various workarounds to popular acclaim.

Online piracy is a real problem. But its solution (if there is one) lies in forging sensible, nimble and nuanced partnerships among those who create and those aggregate and distribute content.

Alec Bruce is a Moncton-based writer on politics, economics and current affairs. Check out his other blog here at Atlantic Business Magazine (ABMOnline): The Uneasy Chair.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.