Crowdsourcing has proven to be a pretty good way to accomplish things that require a lot of input from different people, including the creation of encyclopedias and the financing of personal projects such as movies and comic books. But could it be used to create legislation as well? A couple of groups are hoping that it can: the online community Reddit, which was instrumental in raising awareness about the anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA, is trying to create a “Free Internet Act” that anyone can contribute to, and the nonprofit group Public Knowledge has just launched what it calls the “Internet Blueprint” to do something similar. But is crowdsourcing a solution to Washington bureaucracy, or will it just add to the chaos?

Reddit’s venture has been underway since just after the community — along with Wikipedia and dozens of other sites — went dark as a way of protesting the government’s support of SOPA and PIPA in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Those bills were both sidelined by their supporters in the legislature after the wave of popular outrage that Reddit was a part of, and the user who created the discussion thread that gave birth to the Free Internet Act (an Austrian user who goes by the name RoyalwithCheese22) said he was hoping to build on that momentum, and get the community to craft an alternative to SOPA and PIPA and other similar legislation aimed at the internet.

Could a realistic alternative to SOPA emerge from a Google Doc?

After a draft of the bill took shape on the Reddit thread, it was moved to a Google Docs file that is open for anyone to edit — on a recent visit, there were 30 other viewers, and several were editing the document simultaneously. Among the first notes in the document was one warning users not to deface or ruin the effort, a note that referred to “4chan trolls” (the online community that gave birth to LOLcats and the activist group Anonymous). Among a number of proposed edits was a note from a user going by the name “Downing Street Cat” that took issue with unnecessary capitalization of terms in the bill.

The rest of the bill includes sections on censorship, culpability, content removal, appropriate punishment for those who infringe on the law and the rights of the user. The section on culpability says: “If the content under considerations is a work that was partially or fully derived from another content under copyright, it is required that the derived should contain a minimum of 40% of the original content [and] be wholly comprised of sections of the original [and] not be a subtitled parody.” In the notes, however, someone else has written that this “isn’t very clear in what it intends, and realistically needs a full rewrite.”

The bills proposed by the Public Knowledge project, meanwhile, look and read much more like existing legislation and are an attempt by the nonprofit group to promote alternatives to SOPA and PIPA that have a chance of actually becoming law. The Internet Blueprint site has copies of the bills — such as one entitled “The Strengthening and Improving DMCA Safe Harbors Act,” which would penalize companies for issuing false takedown notices — and users can vote for the ones they like and even click a button to recommend them to their representative. The group is also looking for ideas for other bills, but says it will write them rather than letting anyone contribute the way Reddit does.

Some see crowdsourcing of legislation as a real alternative

It’s one thing to bring a community like the technology industry together via web campaigns to protest an existing or proposed law — but can those same impulses be used to actually create new ones? Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson wrote recently about the Reddit initiative, and how he and his partner Albert Wenger mentioned to a senator the idea of writing legislation in full public view as an alternative to the secretive process that came up with SOPA and PIPA. The senator’s response was that “such radical transparency wasn’t likely to develop in Washington any time soon,” and Wilson said that made him even more interested in pursuing efforts like the Reddit project.

Crowdsourced legislation does exist: the Icelandic parliament, for example, created a new constitution last year based in part on crowdsourced input, and an alternative to SOPA called OPEN was also developed using input from contributors via a website. But the laborious process of putting together a comprehensive piece of legislation — which would require hundreds of pages, legal footnotes and cross-checking with existing laws if it is to succeed in any real way — may simply not be compatible with existing crowdsourcing methods. Even Wikipedia has repeatedly had issues over the years with in-fighting and vandalism, and most of its entries are less than a page long. RoyalwithCheese22 has admitted that the process behind the Reddit bill has been slow and frustrating.

In addition to the difficulties associated with herding cats on the Internet, there’s also the risk that laws like the Free Internet Act will cater only to the technologically savvy — and therefore will become just special-interest bills like the ones that already get circulated in Washington by various groups. To its supporters, however, that would at least put Silicon Valley on equal footing with other interests, and the openness of the process could make the result even more palatable than the alternative. Whether the bill ever gets from Google Docs to Washington, however, remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz

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The MPAA says that enabling Selectable Output Control would help stem piracy and would allow studios to release movies on VOD sooner after they appear in theaters.

Public Knowledge doesn’t buy that argument and sees the issue as a matter of control over what kind of TV you can use. It sent a letter to FCC Genachowski asking the Commission to deny the MPAA the waiver. Public Knowledge wrote:

[O]ver the past year, the MPAA has failed to provide a reason as to why the limited interests of its six member movie studios should be allowed to outweigh the interests of those consumers that will be forced to replace over 20 million television sets and countless other devices in order to view content that their current equipment is capable of displaying.

In its response, the MPAA sent its own letter (PDF) to the FCC and wrote:

[G]rant of the waiver would for the first time allow millions of consumers to view high- value, high-definition theatrical films during an early release window that is not available today. MPAA has explained that release of this high-value content as part of an earlier window, especially with respect to movies released for home viewing close to or even during their initial theatrical run, necessarily requires the highest level of protection possible through use of SOC.

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The final version of the bill eliminates funding for data collection, which means we’re not going to get anything until at least 2010, at which point appropriations might be made, according to an analysis over at Public Knowledge. Additionally, the data collection is supposed to be on a state-by-state basis, which means that comparing apples to apples will be difficult. Just recall how hard it is to get complaint and access line data out of states right now. The carriers are also able to determine exactly how much data they want to disclose about service in various areas.

So what does this legislation do that might help consumers get more information about broadband competition? Well, it does require the General Accounting Office to develop methods and metrics to measure the actual price per bit consumers receive and the actual broadband speeds they experience. These actual speeds can differ widely from advertised speeds, and even based on the type of service a consumer has. We called for such transparency as part of our Broadband Bill of Rights. Now it’s only a matter of waiting and hoping for the money do collect such data. Somewhere, carriers are laughing.

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NebuAd provides a deep-packet inspection appliance that sits on the network of an ISP. The appliance tracks information about the type of sites a user visits and serves up ads against that information. The company got a lot of attention after Charter Communications signed a deal to test the technology.

One of the biggest issues with the technology highlighted in the report include a consumer’s inability to truly opt out of having his Internet communications intercepted. In an interview with NebuAd CEO Bob Sykes in May, he told me all ISPs have to provide opt-out information to consumers, and defended the legality of the product on those grounds.

However, the investigation shows that even if a consumer opts out, they can only opt out of seeing an ad, not out of having their Internet usage tracked. Furthermore, the decision is tracked by a cookie installed in the browser software, which many users delete and is rendered ineffective if the user changes computers or browsers anyway. In response to the report, NebuAd issued the following statement:

“We are disappointed with the misleading characterization of NebuAd in the Free Press and Knowledge Review report issued today. Specifically, we take issue with the inaccurate statements made in reference to NebuAd’s consumer privacy standards and apparent disregard for the controls and policies we have in place to inform and protect internet subscribers. Transparency and consumer privacy protection are core to our business. Reasonable review of materials that have been made available online would have educated the organization that NebuAd requires its ISP partners to provide robust notice to their subscribers prior to deployment of the service.”

In general, the technology may be irritating much in the same way ISPs using forced redirects after a user types in a web site incorrectly is irritating, but it’s not illegal. Congress has threatened to get involved, but I doubt that much will be done any time soon (especially in an election year) to protect consumers from this type of scheme. With ISPs resorting to metered pricing or traffic throttling in a supposed effort to protect their video business, and inserting themselves between consumers and their choice of web sites in an effort to snag ad revenue, you’d think they believe they have a monopoly and can do whatever the hell they want. Oh, wait.

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