The Internet Police and Internet Vigilantes

In his TED talk Larry Lessig cites John Philip Sousa’s argument against the gramophone in favor of interactive, rather than passive, culture. Sousa’s advocacy for interactive culture was at the cost of technology. He sought to return to an older time of different values with simpler technology. Today it is often parents and corporate media makers who seek to preserve their culture and reign in youth’s use of technology.

NPR’s On The Media recently talked about an emerging copyright issue, which may affect the interactive culture of its listeners. As news moves online and newspapers struggle to retain readership, some newspapers are employing “internet trolls” to protect their news copy. These internet trolls make sure that people follow copyright laws, but at the detriment to interactive culture. They are sold the copyright of a newspaper’s content and then sue anybody using that content. They search for and sue mom n’ pop bloggers, young writers, anybody sharing a newspaper’s stories without permission. While lucrative for newspapers, this practice of internet trolling is detrimental to true news readership and engagement. Rather than encouraging people to share and interact with breaking news in an online context, the enforcement of copyright is pushing people back into an era of passive consumption of information. As newspapers continue to make money off this practice, I wonder what other industries may adopt such means to protect their investments.

Dave Pell, of NPR’s tech blog All Tech Considered, (can you tell I’m an NPR fan?) wrote recently about his personal desire for “Internet Police.” While most of his blog post discusses the issue of malfunctioning technology, it opens with a story chronicling technology in the hands of malfunctioning people. Somebody opening an online business had the whole business, website content to domain name, were all “hijacked” by the engineer he hired. Nobody knew how to get around the sophisticated hacking job, and when speaking with the website kidnapper he asked the original website creator: "What are you gonna do, call the Internet Police?"

Sometimes we would all like some Internet Police, however, I don’t think internet trolling is what we had in mind. While I wish to protect creators of online content, I also want the internet to foster a community of open conversation, the sharing and manipulation of ideas. If we hold too tightly to our personal ideas, our created content and the money it might make for us, we hold each other back. If we cannot alter, improvise with, and improve on the information we encounter everyday, how can we grow and change at all?