[x-pubpol] Wikipedia WaPo Op-Ed

[Joly MacFie]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-are-the-media-and-so-are-you/2012/02/09/gIQAfNW8
1Q_story.html

Opinions
We are the media, and so are you

By Jimmy Wales and Kat Walsh, Thursday, February 9, 1:15 PM

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and Kat Walsh are members of the
Wikimedia
Foundation board of trustees.

It's easy to frame the fight over SOPA and PIPA as Hollywood vs. Silicon
Valley - two huge
industries clashing over whose voice should dictate the future of Internet
policy - but
it's absolutely wrong. The bills are dead, thanks to widespread protest.
But the real
architects of the bills' defeat don't have a catchy label or a recognized
lobbying group.
They don't have the glamour or the deep pockets of the studios. Yet they
are the largest,
most powerful and most important voice in the debate - and, until recently,
they've been
all but invisible to Congress.

They are you. And if not you personally, then your neighbors, your
colleagues, your
friends and even your children. The millions of people who called and wrote
their
congressional representatives in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and
the Protect
Intellectual Property Act were "organized" only around the desire to
protect the Web sites
that have become central to their daily lives.

Change like this needed a fresh set of voices. The established tech giants
may have
newfound political influence, but their fights are still the same
closed-door tussles over
minor details. They have been at the table, and they have too much invested
in the process
to change it. More important, they are constrained by obligations to their
shareholders
and investors, as well as by the need to maintain relationships with their
advertisers,
partners and customers.

Wikipedia, its users and its contributors don't have the same constraints.
We don't rely
on advertising dollars or content partnerships. The billions of words and
millions of
images in our projects come from the same place as our financial support:
the voluntary
contribution of millions of individuals. The result is free knowledge,
available for
anyone to read and reuse.

Wikipedia is not opposed to the rights of creators - we have the largest
collection of
creators in human history. The effort that went into building Wikipedia
could have created
shelves full of albums or near-endless nights of movies. Instead it's
providing
unrestricted access to the world's knowledge. Protecting our rights as
creators means
ensuring that we can build our encyclopedias, photographs, videos, Web
sites, charities
and businesses without the fear that they all will be taken away from us
without due
process. It means protecting our ability to speak freely, without being
vulnerable to
poorly drafted laws that leave our fate to a law enforcement body that has
no oversight
and no appeal process. It means protecting the legal infrastructure that
allowed our
sharing of knowledge and creativity to flourish, and protecting our ability
to do so on
technical infrastructure that allows for security and privacy for all
Internet users.

We are not interested in becoming full-time advocates; protests like the
Wikipedia
blackout are a last resort. Our core mission is to make knowledge freely
available, and
making the Web site inaccessible interrupts what we exist to do. The
one-day blackout,
though, was just a speed bump. Breaking the legal infrastructure that makes
it possible to
operate Wikipedia, and sites like ours, would be a much greater disruption.

Two weeks ago we recognized a threat to that infrastructure and did
something we've never
done before: We acknowledged that our existence is itself political, and we
spoke up to
protect it. It turned out to be the largest Internet protest ever.

The full-time advocates of freedom of information, such as the Electronic
Frontier
Foundation and Public Knowledge, have been fighting for decades to help
create the legal
environment that makes our work possible. We cannot waste that effort by
failing to speak
in our own defense when that environment is threatened.

It's absolutely right that Congress cares about the content industry,
recognizing its
ability to innovate, to create wealth and to improve lives. But existing
copyright
enforcement laws were written in a world in which the information we had
access to on a
broad scale came from a few established media outlets. The players were
easy to identify.
They organized into groups with common interests and fought to protect
those interests.
The "content industry" is no longer limited to those few influential
channels.

The laws we need now must recognize the more broadly distributed and
broadly valuable
power of free and open knowledge. They must come from an understanding of
that power and a
recognition that the voices flooding the phone lines and in-boxes of
Congress on Jan. 18
represented the source of that power. These laws must not simply be rammed
through to
appease narrow lobbies without sufficient review or consideration of the
consequences.

Because we are the media industry. We are the creators. We are the
innovators. The whole
world benefits from our work. That work, and our ability to do it, is worth
protecting for
everyone.

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