Is the internet speech or behavior?

In the debate about SOPA and PIPA, there are several assumptions worth examining. The first is that the content of the internet (by "content" I mean every bit of information conveyed via the internet) is "speech" in the same that "speech" was defined at the time that the Constitution was written, and therefore must not be subject to censorship. 

You can do more and more things with the internet each year. Hence, you can do more and more bad things with the internet. Eventually, people will be able to do so many bad things with the internet that in order to maintain any sense of economic or social stability, it will be impossible for governments to maintain a hands-off attitude toward regulating content. The scale of the havoc a malevolent person or group could create online will increase until, at some point, it will be greater than the amount of havoc that a person or group could create offline. We may not be there yet, but the more aspects of life move online, the closer we get to such a scenario.

If we consider the internet to be like speech, well then, we shouldn't restrict it in any way for fears of a new McCarthyist era, or worse. While the analogy of internet to speech is intuitive and made sense when the internet was little other than a replication of offline conversations and news, I think it makes less and less sense the more and more you can do on the internet. When you can engage in almost any activity online that you can engage in offline - commerce, relationships, etc. - then the internet becomes less like speech and more like an alternate social and commercial reality. If we consider the internet to be more like an alternate version of the offline world (or a microcosm of the offline world, complete with commerce, substantive relationships, etc.), then asking the law to stay out of online matters altogether in the name of free speech seems increasingly unworkable and inappropriate.

There's a larger philosophical point we will have to confront at some point: is the internet and all online interaction speech or behavior? Deciding what kinds of speech are okay is very neat and tidy: its pretty much all okay; speech is free. But behavior is not. Deciding what kinds of behavior lead to negative consequences - that is, what kinds of behavior are bad behavior - is very messy. Its an eternally unfinished project. But no one would ever claim that everyone is free to behave as they wish.

If a governing body is given the power to deem some online speech/behavior illegal and worthy of punishment, of course there will be the possibility that those in power could abuse their power and shut down sites not because the sites are doing something that most people would agree is wrong, but because it goes against the interests of those in power. But the same is true of law in the offline world: an authoritarian regime could seize power and enforce rules that are not in the best interest of the people. And yet we live within the law. We have a system of checks and balances in the offline world that, by and large, keep overwhelming corruption from happening.

So it seems increasingly unrealistic to have anything associated with internet content to be utterly and completely free from the rule of law, but clearly, there need to be checks and balances, and it seems as though this part of the plan of legislating online activity, at this stage, hasn't been thought out. Now would be a good time to start figuring out what such law would look like.

Online TV/Film Archiving - The Celestial Mulitplex

This is a response to a blog entry by Kristin Thompson, which was a response to A.O. Scott's article in the NYTimes about the promise of online film distribution and archiving.

The stumbling blocks, for Thompson, seem to be issues of fidelity and/or accuracy. User-generated archives like the vast library of TV shows and ads floating around on YouTube are often (or always, depending on your standards) of low quality, frequently mislabeled, and may be just clips of a longer original or may have a logo imprinted on them (either by the network that broadcast it or by the uploader). If online TV/film archiving works like wikipedia, then you would start off with a partial, mislabeled, low-quality bootleg of a TV show/movie/ad, then it would be corrected/replaced by another person, and then that one would be replaced by an HD version, until you had a copy which would be, in some cases, more true to the original than any well-funded archivist could possibly produce. We, the viewers, would have to make due with more inaccurate, partial, low-quality versions of these motion picture texts, but its better than the alternative: nothing. And it certainly wouldn't be surprising if the improvement of each text evolved at a rate akin to that of wikipedia.

Many experts still have trouble understanding why wikipedia isn't filled with inaccurate information, just as I'm sure many motion picture archivists cannot imagine an open, online archive that won't be filled with incomplete, mediocre copies of films. The debates around the accuracy of wikipedia continue, but I think its safe to say that wikipedia is better than nothing. That's the thing: wikipedia is "competing" with existing encyclopedias. What would the celestial multiplex be competing with? Netflix? Your local library? I'm not saying the online archive would be perfect, but its not hard to imagine it being far more comprehensive than any motion picture library the average citizen has access to. Is being a purist about obscure, out-of-date cinema really worth depriving most people access to millions of films?

Even the google book archiving project seems to miss the point of Web 2.0 (or 3.0, or whatever people are calling it). Experts have to let go of the idea of one person or a group of people being the arbiter(s) of the "truth" of an idea, or, by extension, a book or a film. If there is a site like wikipedia for motion pictures, the experts are free (and perhaps would have a duty) to upload their own pristine copies of films, and correct any misinformation that people have provided along with it.

But how would this work with copyright? Its not unthinkable that once videos are uploaded by users to the celestial multiplex, they can be claimed by their original copyright owners, but instead of being taken down by those owners, they would charge $ to let users view them. I think Google video has set up some sort of pay-per-view archiving of TV shows along these lines. If studios/copyright holders refuse to go along with this centralized, monetized system, one will evolve anyway (see: Napster, gnutella, bittorrent, YouTube, etc). Music labels smartened up by working out deals with ITunes. If motion picture copyright holders won't, then Bittorrent and YouTube (and whatever's next) are likely to pick up the slack. Again, people imagine that we'll either be consuming media in the traditional way, offline, or we'll get it free, illegally, online. Compromise becomes inevitable. ITunes and music labels have made it work. Why wouldn't this work for motion pictures?

These things are hard to predict, of course. I'm only saying that the celestial multiplex isn't as miraculous (nor as inevitable) as Thompson or Scott seem to think. Really, the two authors are writing at cross-purposes. Scott, like most of us, just wants to watch films to experience pleasurable emotions and learn more about life in general. Thompson is more concerned with cinematic artifacts. For scholars, sites like wikipedia or YouTube are insufficient. But that certainly doesn't mean that they aren't of some use to some people, and it doesn't mean (as Thompson suggests) that these sites won't continue to pop up, incorporating different types of information - words, music, films - in the future.