Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a "blackout" of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support. On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States.
The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently, We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate.
And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.
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Team or Enterprise Premium FT. Pay based on use. Does my organisation subscribe? We have very strict rules about obeying copyright and we don't link to materials that we know to be copyright infringement. That isn't really the issue.
The other side will try to paint this as anybody who's opposed to this must be making money off of piracy or be in favor of piracy. That isn't true. The issue here is that this law is very badly written, very broadly overreaching and, in at least the Senate version, would include the creation of a DNS domain name system blocking regime that's technically identical to the one that's used by China.
I don't think that's the right way the U. CNN: Do you think anything needs to be done to stop online piracy? Wales: Within the U. The question of whether foreign sites pose a legitimate problem is I think something that has not be sufficiently studied. It is a valid question. But when it comes to First Amendment concerns, censoring the Internet is never going to be the right answer. I'm not necessarily supporting that one, but I'm saying, 'Gee, we need to take a look at other possibilities here.
One of the things that we know is that spending on entertainment is actually up. So I view this as a bit of a power grab for Hollywood, crying wolf over something that's not as big of a problem as they make it out to be. CNN: There have been some really big statistics thrown around on the side of people who support these anti- piracy laws. Millions of jobs at stake. Billions of dollars in revenue loss for the U. How do you respond to those figures?
Wales: There was an academic study done by the London School of Economics that says the figures thrown around by Hollywood are wishful thinking. Wishful thinking meaning if you count every single download and pretend the person would have paid full retail for something instead of just not consuming it, then you get some pretty large numbers.
But, from the point of view of an economist, that isn't necessarily the right way to measure. So I think those figures are radically overstated, particularly as we see that overall spending is up for entertainment. CNN: You mentioned earlier that these laws would 'censor' the Internet. How so exactly? Wales: One of the provisions in the Senate version, which is still out there, is that under certain circumstances Internet providers would be required to block access to sites, by removing them from the DNS entry list.
So if you type in the domain of a site that's been accused of being devoted to infringement of copyright you wouldn't get an answer of whether that site exists. That's exactly what China does. They do blocking at the DNS level. CNN: Do you oppose that on a technical level or is it the philosophy behind it? Wales: It's a little bit of both. As we look at some of the interesting work that's going on technologically for DNS security, ways of validating that this is the correct website This is an actual critical problem that is being solved at a technical level.
Except that DNS blocking would break the solutions that are already being implemented. The more philosophical point is that if you asked me where the Pirate Bay is located and I tell you the answer -- it's at this IP address -- that is speech. The Supreme Court has held that code is speech. And it doesn't matter that it's done on a computer or done face to face or done in a newspaper, reporting the facts of the world is protected speech.
I don't believe the DNS blocking provisions will pass First Amendment muster, anyway, but it seems a shame to spend two years and a lot of court costs fighting something that's absurd on the face of it.
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