Review: Hacking Politics the TL;DR

A collection of quotes from key players talking about the uprising response to anti-piracy legislation, from COICA to SOPA, from the edge of despair to the blackout.

Who: key figures from the political battle over the internet. Primarily on the side of free internet, but occasionally some responses from the other side as well.

When: published in 2013, covers events from 2010 to 2013.

What/Where: The first chapter from Hacking Politics

The Gist

A collection of quotes from key players talking about the uprising response to anti-piracy legislation, from COICA to SOPA, from the edge of despair to the blackout.

The Good

• Perfect:

“It’s so easy to accidentally copy something. So easy, in fact, that we found the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website.”

Aaron Swartz

• I’d never heard of prior restraint before and really it seems exceedingly clear that SOPA was completely out of bounds with existing case law:

Case law around the First Amendment is clear that you cannot block a much wider variety of speech just because you are trying to stop some specific narrow speech. Because of the respect we have for the First Amendment in the U.S., the law has been pretty clear that anything preventing illegal speech must narrowly target just that kind of speech. Doing otherwise is what’s known as prior restraint.

…

One of the complaints we’ve heard is that such past prior restraint cases do not apply here since “copyright infringement is illegal.” But, both defamation and child pornography also break the law. The point is that in all of these cases, there are existing laws on the books to deal with that specific content, which can be handled with a scalpel. Adding an additional layer that takes down an entire publication is where it stretches into clear censorship.

Mike Masnick

• The irony that some of the biggest proponents of bills like SOPA, Fox and Universal Studios, only exist because there founders were able to escape the reach of Edison’s east coast lawyers in California. Unfortunately in our global economy there is no California for today’s innovators.

When movies were invented, Thomas Edison, who held key film-related pat- ents, claimed the right to authorize the production of films, tightly controlling how many movies could be made each year and what subjects these movies could address. The filmmakers of the day hated this, and they flew west to California to escape the long arm of Edison’s legal enforcers in New Jersey. William Fox, Adolphe Zukor, and Carl Laemmle, of Fox Studios, Famous Players, and Universal, respectively, founded the great early studios because they believed that their right to expression trumped Edison’s proprietary rights.

Cory Doctorow

The Bad

• In no way is this a TL;DR. Yeah, it’s a long book, but a TL;DR should always read like a gist: anymore than 3 sentences is to long.

• It wasn’t cohesive, parts of it flowed nicely, but taking a lot of disparate quotes, even about the same topic/domain, and combining them into a single narrative takes a lot of effort to do right. And something about this was just a little off.

• The whole Richard O’Dwyer situation is terrifying, I thought sites that didn’t host or monitor the content were protected. Apparently not, the fact that they made a college student pay £20,000 or face imprisonment blows my mind.

Questions

• What are they going to throw at us next? Will we be able to stand the next offensive or will people be so worn down that they will just slip a bill right through?

• Is there a future in “hacking” politics, can we still rely on legal channels to effect the change needed? Or are out of bounds methods needed?

Review

Nothing gets me more riled up then patent and copyright law, and this just brought back a lot of bad memories and a few moments of euphoria. There’s a dark road ahead of us and it’s important to remember where we came from.

Rating 4/5