The user-generated news site Reddit and the blog Boing Boing have also said they will take part in the “blackout”.

The sites’ webmasters are opposed to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) being debated by Congress.

However, Twitter has declined to take part in the shutdown.

Marco Werman talks with Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the school of information at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World. Theft in the digital age is just a mouse click away. How you deal with that isn’t so easy. In a moment we’ll hear how artists and writers in Spain are losing out to illegal downloads. First, let’s examine the bill being considered now by the US Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. On the surface it would seem everyone should support legislation to prevent online piracy, but the folks at Wikipedia and Reddit are so mad about SOPA that they’re planning to shutdown their websites tomorrow in protest. Some opponents even say that if the law had already been in a place a year ago it might have negatively affected the Arab Spring protests. Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at the school of information at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Zeynep, what is the best analogy you can give about how this law changes the way the internet works?

Zeynep Tufekci: Well, think about the telephone networks. Sometimes crimes are committed over the phone; people might threaten someone, people might say something they’re not supposed to say. Now, imagine if the response of the telephone company was to listen in on every single conversation and shutdown any conversation that it thought might be illegal. That’s what it’s doing. With the SOPA bill, what these legislations would do is put the burden of vetting every single piece of information uploaded on the internet for copyright violations and stop them if they’re suspect of this, which would effectively mean that we could no longer have user-generated content on the web.

Werman: Other details of SOPA that you can provide us with? I mean what is the act actually proposing that has Wikipedia and Reddit mad enough to shutdown their sites?

Tufekci: It would require internet service providers to block the domain names of websites in other countries that are suspected of illegal copied content. It would make search engines responsible for deleting those websites from their search results, and it would also order payment sites like PayPal from not dealing with any sites suspected of this kind of copyright infringement. Basically, the internet as we know it could not function in any way, shape or form similar to the internet that we know today.

Werman: If this law were in place say a year ago, how do you think it would have affected the protestors in Syria or Egypt or in the Arab Spring?

Tufekci: Well, one thing this law would do is to develop the kind of software that would look into the user’s activities at a very, very deep level because to control internet service providers like that you need that kind of software. And that kind of software is exactly what regimes like Syrian regime and the Chinese regime use to monitor the activities of their dissidents. And in fact, we’ve seen a case in which a hacker analyzer had found that a particular program was logging too much information on cellphones, and he posted analysis of it. And the company responded by claiming that this analysis was violating copyright because Trevor Eckert, the researcher, had posted some manuals. The manuals were actually available publicly online on the company’s own website, so what the company was doing was to use copyright infringement claim as a way to take down criticism. Now, if companies can use copyright infringement every time you criticize or expose an aspect of their dealings, we’re not gonna have free speech as we know it.

Werman: Isn’t the opposition to this, like your opposition and from Wikipedia and Facebook, kind of a difficult sell because SOPA on its face goes after those who pirate movies and music, you know, where the stakes and stakeholders, Hollywood music industry, are very high?

Tufekci: This law is not going to prevent piracy because we know, for example, in Iran the government is trying to block Facebook, but their security agency just announced that there are 17 million users of Facebook in Iran. So if Iranians can get around that kind of censorship, the poeple who want to exchange music, they’re gonna find ways to circumvent this. So what needs to happen is that the music industry and all other stakeholders who have a claim to these intellectual property issues have to find reasonable measures and business models that are compatible with the reality of the internet.

Werman: Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the school of information at the UNC Chapel Hill. Thank you very much indeed.

Tufekci: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Visualize tweets for this story: Click on the image below to see tweets

We say farewell to 2010 with a quintessential episode of The World’s Technology Podcast. In other words, we circle the globe and bring you the tech stories you don’t hear anywhere else. Our highlight this week is a look at some new robotic technologies out of Japan that are assisting the disabled. One is a kind of exo-skeleton that is allowing a stroke victim to walk again. Another is a robot that will help the blind take a walk. The BBC’s Rolad Buerk reports from Japan. You can see a video version of Roland’s story, or read more about the robots he profiled. Also, we will return to Haiti almost a year after a devastating earthquake to hear about a plan to use banking via mobile phone as a way to assist in the ongoing recovery. And you can read more about Mercy Corps’ pilot mobile banking program in Haiti. Then, we’ll set off to Cuba to hear about the island nation’s homegrown answer to Wikipedia, called EcuRed. Along the way, we’ll also hear about efforts to make networks of both computers, and humans, a bit smarter when it comes to making decisions. Hint: it involves something called human-agent collectives, not SkyNet.

And finally, we’ll take a look at some inspector gadgets. The inspectors in question are a class of new recruits at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. And the gadgets are designed to help them detect weapons. You can even check out a slideshow of the gadgets.

Remember, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook

Right, “no more whining.” The message was received loud and clear from many quarters last week. Sorry about that, and let’s get on with a great show for a fantastic crew of listeners. That was evidenced by the email I received from Dr. Haidar Samiei, who wrote in to say that the people he’s heard interviewed on WTP have been an inspiration to him. He and a friend have developed a medical app for the iPhone — check it out here.

Listener Derek Bruff put me onto our lead story this week: Greg Kulowiec, who is pictured here. Greg is a high school history teacher at Plymouth South High School in Plymouth, MA. He’s also a blogger, and a big fan of using all sorts of technologies as teaching tools in his classroom. It’s part of on-going attempt to talk to tech folks who have, as one listener put it, “dirt under their finger nails.” Greg mentioned a couple of different videos he’s created about his different tech and teaching projects. Here’s a demo video of him using Poll Everywhere. And here’s the Animoto video Greg created using cell phones and Evernote.

Next, we turn to a bit darker side of cell phones. The World’s Jeb Sharp, who creates an amazing weekly history podcast called “How We Got Here,” tells us about the role that conflict minerals (including a few that make your cell phone your cell phone) are playing in the violence in Congo.

And, do you remember last week’s segment on the British engineering team that was trying to break the record for the fastest steam-powered vehicle ever? Well, they did it. We’ll have an update and reaction from the team. We’ll also have an interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. At a Wikipedia conference in Buenos Aires this week, there were some interesting decisions made about how pages about subjects that are still alive will be edited. Here’s a BBC link to the story.

And we end with a story about, well, artificial trees. The Brits want to use the flyswatter shaped “trees” as a way of controlling carbon emissions. You can read more about that here.

Here’s a link to the World Science Podcast, which I am also responsible for ruining this week ;)

Just remember that you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.