Well, that was interesting!
Wednesday’s day of protest marks, I believe, a profoundly important turning-point in the history of the Net and of its place in human society. Several months ago, in one of my many periodic rants about the dreadful, unconstitutional, and repellant features of the intellectual property laws introduced into this session of Congress (SOPA and Protect-IP), I wrote:
The IP bills that Congress now has before it . . . are deep and profound threats to the Net and to our freedom on the Net. If anyone has good ideas about how to fight back other than to stand on the street-corner, as I am doing now, and shouting to the rooftops, I’d be interested to hear them.
I co-authored (with Mark Lemley and Dave Levine) a “Law Professors’ Letter of Opposition,” and I’ve blogged about it a number of times before (as have others), . But I’m going to keep at it because this is an issue that really needs more public traction than it is getting. I’m not going to stand here and say that this law will destroy the Internet as we know it, although I actually believe that to be true. I’m not going to say it, because predicting the future is impossible and I like to avoid doing it in public — though, like all of us, I have my own beliefs about what the future will bring. So I’ll put that aside and focus on the principles at stake; even if the damned thing weren’t going to destroy the Net as we know it, it is of surpassing ugliness, and if you care about freedom and liberty, you’ll agree with me.
What’s most gratifying about the events of the last couple of days — and I assume that you don’t need me to point you to the Wikipedia blackout, the Google petition, etc. etc., and the avalanche of media coverage this generated — is not just that these awful bills now stand a much, much lower chance of passage than they did a week ago (though that’s very gratifying). (Chris Dodd, head of the MPAA and one of the prime backers of the bills, is quoted in today’s NY Times as being ready to sit down with the tech companies and talk about the best ways to fight online piracy – a sure sign that the copyright maximalists have pretty much raised the white flag, at least temporarily, in this battle).
And it’s gratifying, too, on a personal level, to have participated, in even a small way, in bringing these events to pass. I do think that our Law Profs’ Letter, released early in the game, helped draw attention to the issues involved and to galvanize the opposition; there were 60,000 or so downloads from scribd.com, a good deal more than I’m accustomed to, and our op-Eds at the Stanford Law Review and Huffington Post got lots of play as well.
But that’s not the most gratifying thing about these events, either. The most gratifying thing, to me, is that we helped push the Net to an inflection point that is, in a way, its only hope of survival. The Internet is a much more fragile thing than most people believe it to be, and if it is to thrive it will need a kind of civic engagement that we haven’t had – until now. About a year and a half ago I gave a keynote talk at a conference at Michigan State on “The Challenge(s) of Cyberlaw,” and I said the following:
Let me start with an observation the great Lon Fuller made many years ago, an observation I like so much I’ve put it somewhere in probably half the things I’ve ever published. Fuller wrote, at the end of a discussion of the future of international law:
“[L]ike many other precious human goals, the rule of law may best be achieved by not aiming at it directly. What is perhaps most needed is not an immediate expansion of international law, but an expansion of international community, . . . When this has occurred – or rather as this occurs – the law can act as a kind of midwife; or, to change the [metaphor], the law can act as a gardener who prunes an imperfectly growing tree in order to help the tree realize its own capacity for perfection. This can occur only when all concerned genuinely want the tree to grow, and to grow properly. Our task is to make them want this. . . .”
What did he mean? And what does it have to do with what we’re doing? The tree can “realize its own capacity for perfection,” but only when “all concerned genuinely want it to grow properly,” and our task is “to make them want this.” ???
What it means, to me, is this: Our task, as lawyers and law professors and “experts” on these difficult questions, is not really to solve the many problems bedeviling “Internet law.” Rather, our task is to help others to think about those problems, and to galvanize them into doing so, to make want the tree, as it were, to grow properly. If the Internet and its law – whatever that is, and whomever is responsible for making it in its many forms – is to evolve sensibly (whatever we may mean by that), everyone with a stake in it needs to care about it, and to attend to it – to give a damn, and to set the wheels in motion whereby sensible law might – might – get made.
That happens, I’d suggest, when people start to think of themselves as “citizens” of this new place, this “imagined community.” Because that is what citizens do: they care – they have standing to care, a kind of entitlement to care – about events, especially legally significant events, transpiring in faraway places, because those events affect them as citizens of a common place. People may, of course, care about other events affecting others, those with whom they do not share the bond of citizenship – about floods in Pakistan, and war in Darfur, and repression in Iran – but they care about those things in a different way, a non-participatory way.
And the other thing that citizens do is they defend their place when it is threatened or under attack.
I think, in short, that our task is to somehow help people to think of themselves as “Netizens.” There – I’ve said it.
Like a lot of good ideas (and, I suppose, a lot of bad ones, too), this one will prove easy to ridicule, especially in its more ridiculous formulations. But we should resist the temptation. Just to be clear, here’s what I don’t mean by it. I don’t mean that we will or should cast off the shackles of this earthly existence, renounce our citizenship in the dinosaur-like nation-states we have been bequeathed, and begin building the New Jerusalem online. And I don’t mean that we should consider ourselves citizens of the Net in lieu of, or in contrast to, or in conflict with, our status as citizens of the United States (or France, or Brazil, or wherever).
That’s not what being a Netizen means. What it does mean is that we are all now members of a global community with a very specific, very particular shared interest in the health and well-being of this network, and that we should begin thinking and acting as such; that we all have a stake, along with all the other members of that community, equally, in what happens on and to that network, and that we have a right, and possibly even a duty, to find ways to participate in shaping and governing it so that it remains as vibrant and open as we want it to be (whatever we collectively think that means).
It’s a terrible label — “netizen” — but an important concept. If people don’t really believe they have an interest in this thing that we have built, then it is doomed. The converse, alas, isn’t true — but people giving a damn about the health of the Internet is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for it to be healthy, going forward. And that’s what the events of this past week were about. All of a sudden, millions of people (check out some of the astonishing numbers hereh) took the Net seriously as a place that needed defending, and millions more tried to figure out why those first millions were so upset and what they were upset about. It does not, by itself, solve any problems — we might still get some terrible law down the road, on this issue or any one of a number of others, that will strangle this medium. But it sets the foundation for processes that can solve those problems, and that is a very, very good thing.