“A culture of cut and paste is made to order for the Net, where an almost anything goes attitude prevails” — Dan Gillmor, We the Media.
Throughout the final chapters of his book, Dan Gillmor illustrates the increasingly intricate world of copyright laws on the Net. It is enough to make anyone’s head spin and by the time you come out of your dizzy spell, the laws will have changed, one hundred more blog posts will have been written and you will have to learn it all over again. Still, I want to focus on this idea of cybersquatting for just a moment. From my understanding, these are the people that buy web addresses that sound similar to popular trademark names in order to drive traffic toward the website, or sell back the name for profit. U.S. law bans ‘bad faith intent to profit’, however cybersquatting does not sound all that different from investment banking. In the most basic sense of the term, people are constantly investing in companies and real estate. They do not do so with intent to utilize those companies’ services or live on that property, but rather to sell them back and turn them into profit. So how is buying a domain name, with the intent to sell it, any different?
The problem here, of course, is the inability to control what happens when domain names are bought and then used to supply incorrect or even malicious information. For instance, if a middle-schooler is writing a paper on Martin Luther King Jr. and Googles the preacher’s name, he or she will find a long list of websites with biographical and historical information from a poignant time in recent history. Upon closer inspection, we see that the third website listed on the Google page is www.martinlutherking.org. Sounds perfect right? WRONG. The website is one radical bigot’s rant against every historical fact about Martin Luther King’s character, accomplishments and values. The first ’suggested reading’ on the site is My Awakening, by David Duke, America’s most famous racist, white-supremacist, Holocaust-denying anti-Semite. I am all for freedom of speech, but where do we draw the line when incoherent and often dangerous information is being splashed all over the web?
Gillmor offers almost juxtaposing positions on how to view the Internet and the daily emergence of new media technologies. On the one hand, the Internet and more importantly the advent of citizen journalism, is a hallmark of freedom, transparency and access to information that is unprecedented in history. It provides a platform where passive readers can become active collaborators, informants and opinionites. On the other hand, centralization and authority are slowly creeping in, threatening our ability to ‘freely’ surf the web without surveillance and documentation. Anyone with a decent grip on cyberspeak would be able to trace a long history of websites that an individual has visited, with the proverbial ‘click of a button’. Furthermore, countries like Brazil are now implementing laws mandating that people must fully disclose their identity before using the Internet, or face up to four years in jail. Blogger Meme de Carbono writes on Daniel Duende’s Global Voices Online blog that “the Internet is a great menace to the power established by media, governments and corporations. These established powers are used to speaking to, but not interacting with, their subjects”. With the new laws in place, the threat of ‘cybercrimes’ could silence an entire public.
Fears of piracy and plagiarism haunt the online publishing industry to a far higher degree than its printed predecessor. Wherease we commonly think that information and innovatin foster creative freedom, it can be argued that they actually limit it. This reminds me of a paper I wrote in college for an English class. I wonder if Dan Gillmor ever imagined he would be compared to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a student’s blogpost. In A Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau examines the debilitation of society as it progresses from the original state of nature. He argues that the acquisition of knowledge leads to technology and commoditization, which in turn produce desire and greed. Desire and greed lead to possession and possession leads to weakness. Gillmor implies that every blogger is a plagiarist because he or she is constantly linking to the words of others. He or she is submitting to the language of others, in order to foster progress. Rousseau would then say that the individual is actually submissive to a set of ideas previously established, and bound to those ideas because attempting to alter them is impossible. In this way, language oppresses rather than liberates. Plagiarism Today author Jonathan Baily writes on the Blog Herald that most of the viewings of website content do not take place on websites or RSS feeds, but on other sites. A report released by Attributor found that online publishers have an off-site audience of about 1.5 times the size of the audience that visits their websites. So the question is, if we are chained to the prescribed laws of dispensing language (word formation, sentence structure, etc) and use the language of others to drive our own interpretations of the world, are we in fact allowing innovation and technology to repress rather than liberate us?
