Erstellt am: 18. 1. 2012 - 13:01 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Black Wednesday
Erich Möchel reported on the shelving of SOPA and provided an excellent explanation on the background behind the resistance to it
Late Monday night I got in a conversation with Dick Costolo because of a comment that had been retweeted by a friend of mine. That comment immediately caught a lot of other peoples attention, and ended up as a headline all across the internet.
This comment
"That's just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish,"
Resulted in headlines like this:
Twitter boss slams Wikipedia's 'silly' Sopa protest
Which is sad. Because it totally misses the true horror of that tweet. I'm pretty sure that the silly was in response to the question wether or not twitter would have the "cojones" to close down for a day. And phrased like that, turning protest into a display of machismo, IS pretty damn silly.
As the discussions developed it became pretty clear that Mr. Costolo wasn't being critical of Wikipedias decision, but that it just didn't make sense for twitter. Ok.
What didn't become clear, was that Mr. Costolo understood just how wrong he was in portraying SOPA and PIPA as "single issue national politics".
They aren't. They are the most recent examples of US laws that can have a massive impact on the rest of the online planet.
And it's really frightening that the head of a company like Twitter doesn't see that.
Aside form the tendency of US copyright laws to lead to regional equivalents in other countries (we have all been DMCA'd) the simple fact that so much of the net is still dependent on US based hardware and companies means that we can't avoid being affected.
The most recent example of that has been the case of Richard O'Dwyer who the US wants to extradite to face charges of copyright infringement. His defense has argued that the website he hosted was currently legal under European law, an argument that apparently wasn't considered valid enough to keep him from being handed over to the U.S.
Of course, most of you probably aren't hosting link sites to copyrighted material, but that doesn't mean you aren't currently bumping up against the edges of US laws.
Did you know you had to be 13 to use gmail?
Martin Sutherland didn't until his son made the mistake of activating his Google+ profile. That activation led to Google shutting down his son's account, locking him out completely.
But have you ever wondered why you have to be 13 to sign up for various services? It's because of a U.S. law. COPPA was put in place to regulate the way sites dealt with the personal data of children under 13.
Not a bad thing, I will admit, but it at least serves as a practical example of how dependant we are on the legislation that gets passed in the States. Three Strikes laws, ISP data retention and DRM regulation are just a few of the things that are working their way out form the U.S. to the rest of us.
I'm afraid there is much more to come.
In the mean time you can keep up to date and get some more background from a few Storify pages.