[bestbits] What is civil society's position on copyright in Internet governance?

[Mike Godwin (mgodwin@INTERNEWS.ORG)]

Jeremy writes:

"It is not impossible for civil society to play both an inside and an outside game simultaneously, because certainly there are things that you cannot accomplish with only only one approach, and if managed carefully, they can reinforce rather than undermining each other.”

It’s difficult to overstate how true Jeremy’s observation is. Speaking as someone who was deeply involved in Wikipedia’s anti-SOPA strategy, I can assure you that we strategized “inside” and “outside” games more or less simultaneously. The anti-SOPA inside game, standing alone, was not going to be successful and a pure-protest outside game likely would not have been successful either.

I’ve written about this for Sunlight Foundation (https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/02/07/guest-blogger-sunlight-got-it-wrong/), and I have a ten-minute-long YouTube presentation that addresses the same subject here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqQOvxyj66w.

As I wrote in the Sunlight article:

'Now, once the the blackouts and other responses were being prepared and were implemented, certainly this enabled well-moneyed and well-established  interests to say to policymakers, "Hey, this non-controversial stuff you've fast-tracked may not be so uncontroversial after all."  And the fast and furious backtracking by supporters underscored what the policymakers were hearing. So you should not read me as saying that Google et al. simply got out of the way of the disgruntled public. There was synergy there, as there generally is in multifactorial human political events. The public protest enabled tech companies to say that the issue was a real one for individuals.'


—Mike


--
Mike Godwin | Senior Legal Advisor, Global Internet Policy Project
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