Newswise — Tarleton Gillespie, a professor of communication and information science at Cornell University and author of the book, “Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture,” whose research focuses on controversies surrounding digital media and commercial content providers, comments on today’s protests by Wikipedia and other websites over potential federal antipiracy legislation.
Gillespie says:
"While it's reasonable for Congress to look for progressive ways to enforce copyrights and discourage flagrant piracy, the Stop Online Piracy Act is a fundamentally dangerous way to go about it.
"Under SOPA, if a website is accused of hosting or enabling infringing materials, the Attorney General can order search engines to remove that site from their listings, require ISPs to block users' access to it, and demand payment services and advertising networks to cancel their accounts with it. This is a tempting approach, but it undercuts the longstanding American tradition of how to govern information, which has always erred on the side of letting information be accessible to citizens so as to be judged.
"These are the same strategies used to restrict political speech not only in China, Iran and Vietnam, but right here at home against Wikileaks. So, this tactic could not only be dangerous to commercial speech, but to vital, contested, political speech as well.
"We are at a point of temptation.
"Both the longstanding U.S. legal tradition of information freedoms and the newly emergent structural logic of the Internet as a robust space of public expression require a firm commitment in our laws: to ensure that the Internet remains navigable, that sites remain visible, that pointers point and search engines list, regardless of the content. Sites hosting and benefitting from illegal or infringing content should be addressed directly by courts and law enforcement, armed with a legal scalpel delicate enough to avoid carving off huge swaths of legitimate expression. A policy premised on rendering parts of the web invisible is damaging to what the Internet is and could be as a public resource."
JOURNALISTS PLEASE NOTE: Professor Gillespie is currently working in France, but is happy to do interviews via email, telephone or Skype.
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