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

[JOSEFSSON Erik]

I'd sign up to that 'inside' and 'outside' thing wrt ACTA, but I would not really call it that "we strategized". Different paths were followed by different people who sometimes were in conflict with each other, at different times also on fundamental strategical issues e.g. whether to kill ACTA in Court or in Plenary (or even whether to kill ACTA at all).

//Erik


________________________________
From: bestbits-request at lists.bestbits.net [bestbits-request at lists.bestbits.net] on behalf of Mike Godwin (mgodwin at INTERNEWS.ORG) [mgodwin at INTERNEWS.ORG]
Sent: Sunday 4 May 2014 22:27
To: Jeremy Malcolm; Achal Prabhala
Cc: Mishi Choudhary; anriette at apc.org; bestbits at lists.bestbits.net
Subject: Re: [bestbits] What is civil society's position on copyright in Internet governance?

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


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