Quotulatiousness

February 1, 2012

The wonders of selection, or why it now takes you an hour to find “just the right item” at the store

Filed under: Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

Monty (who just joined Twitter) linked to a Reason article on the glories of choice we have available to us in the western world. Monty’s comment:

The glories of capitalism, as expressed in the salty-snacks aisle of the supermarket. When you have a surfeit of a good or service, the value-add stops being the utility-value of the good and instead becomes esthetics or status. That’s why rich people drive Rolls Royces and Ferraris instead of Toyotas and Fords. As cars, they all do pretty much the same thing and in pretty much the same way; but the value-add of a Ferrari lies in aspects not directly related to the utility value of the vehicle. You can say the same about nearly any other commodity class, from clothes to electronics…to snack foods.

And the A Barton Hinkle article he links to:

But you don’t have to research the past 50 years of product flops to make the case. Just check a vending machine. There you will find every possible combination and interpolation of snack food. In the potato chip category alone — we don’t have time to look at crackers, cheese puffs, corn chips, or cookies — one finds not just barbecue- or cheddar-flavored chips, but chili cheese, cool ranch, ragin’ ranch, habanero, cheddar jalapeno, hot sauce, honey cheese, creamy chipotle, Mediterranean herb, and ketchup-flavored chips.

It’s obvious what’s going on here. Like every other industry, America’s snack-food makers live in deathly fear that the other guys are going to come up with the next “disruptive innovation” first, so everyone is trying to innovate as fast as they can. The poor sots in middle management have been told next year’s raise depends on producing X amount of revenue from new products. But there are only so many truly new products you can think up. Answer? Combine existing products the way you choose from a Chinese take-out menu: one from Column A, one from Column B. …

This seems to be the method at Hammacher Schlemmer — the fine folks who bring you must-have products like the bath mat/alarm clock and the remote-control pillow. It seems to work for them. So why not try it with snack food? Pickle-flavored potato chips, that’s why. Who needs all that ridiculous junk? Your basic potato-flavored potato chip was good enough for our ancestors and by gad sir, it should be good enough for us.

Or at least this is my attitude when standing before a vending machine. Whisk me into an office-supply store, however, and the tune suddenly changes. I am among those who have a weak spot — call it a fetish, call it an obsession — for school supplies. Pens, especially.

Arson victim now being dragged through the courts for defending himself with firearms

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

Canadian prosecutors have a strong aversion to the idea that people should be allowed to protect themselves, especially if firearms are involved:

Just when was Ian Thomson guilty of unsafe storage of a firearm? Mr. Thomson is the Port Colborne, Ont., man currently standing trial in a Welland, Ont. courtroom after he and his home were attacked by firebombers in August, 2010. (That’s correct, in the topsy-turvy world of Canadian criminal justice, Mr. Thomson and his home were the ones attacked and yet he is the one on trial.)

Having dropped other more serious charges — such as dangerous use of a firearm — because they concluded there was no reasonable chance of winning a conviction, Crown prosecutors have nonetheless bullied ahead with unsafe storage charges against Mr. Thomson.

One can only speculate on the Crown’s motives, but many prosecutors are so opposed to private citizens owning guns and, especially, using guns to defend themselves, their loved ones or property, that it is easy to believe prosecutors are running Mr. Thomson through the ringer in an attempt to discourage other homeowners from following his lead. They have conceded they cannot get a conviction against the retired crane operator and former firearms instructor for shooting at the three men who were trying to burn down his house with him in it, but perhaps they are hopeful their decision to drag Mr. Thomson through months of emotionally draining and expensive court proceedings will cause other homeowners to conclude armed self-defence isn’t worth the hassle.

Update: An already strange case appears to be getting stranger, as the judge needed to adjourn the court to allow time for the lawyers to figure out just what the law actually says:

Canada’s laws on the storage and handling of guns and ammunition are so complicated that a veteran judge needed to adjourn court to allow two experienced lawyers more time for legal arguments and a search of case law to help parse and dissect them.

It was a dud of an ending after two days of trial in the case of Ian Thomson, a 54-year-old Port Colborne man who fired three shots from a legally owned gun to scare off three masked men who were firebombing his secluded farmhouse while one threatened: “Are you ready to die?”

And the crown displays a remarkable lack of firearms knowledge:

Mr. Mahler said Mr. Thomson was “less than forthcoming” and “secretive” when police arrived. He suggested Mr. Thomson even picked up the spent shell casings from his porch and hid them in his bedside table.

Seeming confused, Mr. Thomson said he didn’t understand.

“Didn’t they fall to the ground?” Mr. Mahler asked, apparently thinking shell casings from a .38-calibre revolver were ejected from the gun with each shot.

“No,” said Mr. Thomson as the crowd of gun advocates watching from the public gallery chuckled and guffawed at Mr. Mahler’s mistake.

Spent shells from a .38 remain in the gun’s cylinder until it is opened and they are removed. Mr. Thomson took the casings out at the same time he opened the gun to reload it, which was at the bedside table, where the casings were when police arrived, he said.

Of course, if he’d had enough time to collect expended brass — in the dark — before police arrived, it doesn’t support the idea that the police were going to be timely in arriving after he first called 911, does it?

January 31, 2012

Gary Johnson calls for the immediate repeal of the Patriot Act

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

Posted at the Gary Johnson campaign website:

Speaking Sunday night to a national ACLU conference, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson called for repealing the Patriot Act in its entirety. The two-term governor and presidential candidate’s remarks were delivered in Orlando, FL, at the ACLU’s annual National Staff Conference.

Johnson said, “Ten years ago, we learned that the fastest way to pass a bad law is to call it the ‘Patriot Act’ and force Congress to vote on it in the immediate wake of a horrible attack on the United States. The irony is that there is really very little about the Patriot Act that is patriotic. Instead, it has turned out to be yet another tool the government is using to erode privacy, individual freedom and the Constitution itself.

“Benjamin Franklin had it right. ‘Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety’.

“Absolutely, protecting the American people from those who would do us harm is the federal government’s most basic duty. Everyone gets that. But when harm is done, as on 9-11, it is the nature of government to ask for more power and more authority in order to protect us. That’s how we get laws like the Patriot Act.

January 30, 2012

Irish bishop accused of hate speech

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:25

Blogger “Archbishop Cranmer” is calling for an “I’m Spartacus” response to this pending prosecution of Bishop Philip Boyce:

The Most Reverend Dr Philip Boyce is the Catholic Lord Bishop of Raphoe. He preached a homily on 20th August 2011, entitled ‘To Trust in God’. His Grace reproduces it in its entirety, for the two sentences highlighted in bold have landed the Bishop in a bit of hot water.

Apparently, they constitute an incitement to hatred, at least according to ‘leading humanist’ John Colgan. And so the Gardai have thoroughly investigated the complaint and compiled a file which they have handed to the Republic’s Director of Public Prosecutions.

So what horrible things did the Bishop utter in his “incitement to hatred” that has John Colgan so upset?

The moment of history we live through in Ireland at present is certainly a testing one for the Church and for all of us. Attacked from the outside by the arrows of a secular and godless culture: rocked from the inside by the sins and crimes of priests and consecrated people, we all feel the temptation to lose confidence. Yet, our trust is displayed and deepened above all when we are in troubled and stormy waters. It is easier to be confident when we ride on the crest of a wave, when the tide is coming in. Not so easy, however, yet every bit as necessary, when what is proclaimed by the Church namely the truth of faith with its daily practice and influence on behaviour, is under severe pressure.

[. . .]

Indeed unless we trust in a higher power, in God himself, what hope can we have? St. Paul told his converts at Ephesus that before they came to know Christ, they were “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). We need the radiance of a hope that looks beyond the horizons of space and time, one as Pope Benedict teaches “that cannot be destroyed even by small-scale failures or by a breakdown in matters of historic importance” (Spe Salvi No. 35). For the distinguishing mark of Christian believers is “the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness…. To come to know God — the true God — means to receive hope” (Ibid, No. 2.3). We thank God for the faith, that enables us to trust in Him.

Perhaps I’m just particularly dense but the bold sentences above are apparently the “hate speech” nuggets in question. I don’t see it myself…

John Colgan said of these two sentences: “I believe statements of this kind are an incitement to hatred of dissidents, outsiders, secularists, within the meaning of the (Incitement to Hatred) Act, who are perfectly good citizens within the meaning of the civil law. The statements exemplify the chronic antipathy towards secularists, humanists etc, which has manifested itself in the ostracising of otherwise perfectly good Irish citizens, who do not share the aims of the Vatican’s Irish Mission Church.”

The battle of the stereotypes over the “Page 3 girls”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

In spiked, Gabrielle Shiner explains that she doesn’t want or need the “Turn Your Back on Page 3” campaigners to pre-select what she’s allowed to see in the newspaper:

With the Leveson Inquiry currently insisting that the press bares all, campaign groups such as Turn Your Back on Page 3 have spotted an opportunity to force the tabloid’s topless ladies to cover themselves up. And all in the name of protecting girls like me from being terrorised by tits.

The campaign to get bare chests banned is certainly not short of grand claims. Apparently, Page 3 and its like perpetuate sexism by, ‘at best, encouraging and endorsing negative attitudes towards us and within us, and at worst, [encouraging and endorsing] acts of violence committed against us’. According to campaigners, the government therefore has a responsibility to satiate these campaigners’ appetite for paternalism, which they believe equates to ‘stamping out sexism once and for all’.

The Turn Your Back on Page 3 campaigners are right about one thing: an offensive misrepresentation of women exists in society. But it is this group of self-appointed saviours that has offended. The group parades itself as representative of women in order to justify forcing its views on the public. But if these supposed advocates of women’s rights were serious about liberties, they would not condone such bans.

And it is not just that the campaigners are unjustified in speaking on behalf of women — they have also misrepresented women and men. These campaigners present women as pitiful animals teeming with self-loathing. Men are depicted as uncontrollable beasts who are so mesmerised by the breasts on Page 3 that these images, at best, define their perception of women for evermore and, at worst, turn them to violence.

January 29, 2012

EFF says “Keep Twitter Honest”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the facts about Twitter’s recent announcement that it will be able to remove Tweets on a country-by-country basis:

Yesterday, Twitter announced in a blog post that it was launching a system that would allow the company to take down content on a country-by-country basis, as opposed to taking it down across the Twitter system. The Internet immediately exploded with allegations of censorship, conspiracy theories about Twitter’s Saudi investors and automated content filtering, and calls for a January 28 protest. One thing is clear: there is widespread confusion over Twitter’s new policy and what its implications are for freedom of expression all over the world.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Twitter already takes down some tweets and has done so for years. All of the other commercial platforms that we’re aware of remove content, at a minimum, in response to valid court orders. Twitter removes some tweets because they are deemed to be abuse or spam, while others are removed in compliance with court orders or DMCA notifications. Until now, when Twitter has taken down content, it has had to do so globally. So for example, if Twitter had received a court order to take down a tweet that is defamatory to Ataturk — which is illegal under Turkish law — the only way it could comply would be to take it down for everybody. Now Twitter has the capability to take down the tweet for people with IP addresses that indicate that they are in Turkey and leave it up everywhere else. Right now, we can expect Twitter to comply with court orders from countries where they have offices and employees, a list that includes the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, and soon Germany.

Twitter’s increasing need to remove content comes as a byproduct of its growth into new countries, with different laws that they must follow or risk that their local employees will be arrested or held in contempt, or similar sanctions. By opening offices and moving employees into other countries, Twitter increases the risks to its commitment to freedom of expression. Like all companies (and all people) Twitter is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates, which results both in more laws to comply with and also laws that inevitably contradict one another.

China and the censorship state

Filed under: China, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Rebecca MacKinnon in the National Post on the ways and means of ensuring “harmony” in China’s corner of the internet:

In fall 2009, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched as Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, paraded onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the “China Internet Self-Discipline Award.” Officials from the quasi-governmental Internet Society of China praised them for fostering “harmonious and healthy Internet development.” In the Chinese regulatory context, “healthy” is a euphemism for “porn-free” and “crime-free.” “Harmonious” implies prevention of activity that would provoke social or political disharmony.

China’s censorship system is complex and multilayered. The outer layer is generally known as the “great firewall” of China, through which hundreds of thousands of websites are blocked from view on the Chinese Internet. What this system means in practice is that when one goes online from an ordinary commercial Internet connection inside China and tries to visit a website such as hrw.org, the website belonging to Human Rights Watch, the web browser shows an error message saying, “This page cannot be found.” This blocking is easily accomplished because the global Internet connects to the Chinese Internet through only eight “gateways,” which are easily “filtered.” At each gateway, as well as among all the different Internet service providers within China, Internet routers — the devices that move the data back and forth between different computer networks — are all configured to block long lists of website addresses and politically sensitive keywords.

These blocks can be circumvented by people who know how to use anti-censorship software tools. It is impossible to conduct accurate usage surveys, but it is believed likely that hundreds of thousands of Chinese Internet users deploy these tools to access Twitter and Facebook every day. Yet researchers estimate that out of China’s 500 million Internet users, only about 1% or so (a number somewhere in the single-digit millions — still a large number of people but not enough percentage-wise to shape majority public opinion) use these tools to get around censorship, either because most do not know how or because they lack sufficient interest in, or awareness of, what exists on the other side of the “great firewall.”

January 28, 2012

Deirde McCloskey on the “Bourgeois Virtues” that sparked the modern world

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dalibor Rohac reviews some of the key arguments in McCloskey’s recent book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (which I’m currently reading — and very impressed with).

Unlike “Bourgeois Virtues,” “Bourgeois Dignity” makes a historical argument. Modern economic growth, she claims, is a result of an ideological and rhetorical transformation. In the Elizabethan period, business was sneered upon. In Shakespeare’s plays, the only major bourgeois character, Antonio, is a fool because of his affection for Bassanio. There is no need to dwell on how the other bourgeois character in “The Merchant of Venice,” Shylock, is characterized.

She contrasts this with attitudes 200 years later. When James Watt died in 1819, a statue of him was erected in Westminster Abbey and later moved to St. Paul’s cathedral. This would have been unthinkable two centuries earlier. In Ms. McCloskey’s view, this shift in perceptions was central to the economic take-off of the West. “A bourgeois deal was agreed upon,” she says. “You let me engage in innovation and creative destruction, and I will make you rich.” A commercial class that was not ostracized or sneered at was thus able to activate the engine of modern economic growth.

Ms. McCloskey insists that alternative explanations for the Industrial Revolution fail, for a variety of reasons. Property rights, she says, could not have been the principal cause because England and many other societies had stable and secure property rights for a long time. Similarly, Atlantic trade and plundering of the colonies were too insignificant in revenue to have made the real difference. There had long been much more trade in the Indian Ocean than in the Atlantic, moreover, and China or India had never experienced an industrial revolution.

By elimination, Ms. McCloskey concludes that culture and rhetoric are the only factors that can account for economic change of the magnitude we have seen in the developed world in past 250 years.

January 27, 2012

Popehat‘s Censorious Asshat round-up

Filed under: Cancon, India, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

If you’re not already following the adventures of Ken at Popehat, you’re really missing some entertainment. Here are a couple of items from this week’s round-up of the folks who want to shut you up when you say things they don’t like using the legal system as a large club:

First up, we have Dr. Randeep Dhillon! Dr. Dhillon is suing Jay Leno. Is he suing Jay Leno for being a trite, phone-it-in placeholder? NO! There’s no California cause of action for that! SAG would never allow it! No, Randeep Dhillon is suing Jay Leno for a lame joke about Mitt Romney suggesting that his vacation home was the Golden Temple of Amritsar, a holy site for Sikhs! [. . .]

Congrats, Dr. Dhillon! You win a date with California’s robust anti-SLAPP statute! You’re going to pay Jay Leno’s attorney fees in this case, which I will estimate to be $50,000! And because some people will generalize about Sikhs based on the act of one asshole — you — you’ve just done more to expose Sikhs to hatred, contempt, ridicule, and obloquy than that threadbare hack Leno ever could! Way to go!

And from closer to home (and, I note, the very first time I’ve needed to use the New Brunswick tag):

Next, ladies and gentlemen, we travel North, to Canada, and the Fredericton, New Brunswick Police Department! The Fredericton Police just staged a eight-officer raid of the apartment of Charles LeBlanc! Is Charles LeBlanc breaking bad with a meth lab? Does he have children in cages? Is he a gun-runner? No! He’s a blogger, and he’s being raided for criminal libel for criticizing the Fredericton Police! That’s right! The Fredericton Police Department not only thinks it is appropriate to serve search warrants on bloggers who say mean things to them, they think that they should execute the search warrants themselves, even though they are the alleged victims of the criminal libel! That’s the New Professionalism in action, ladies and gents! Stand and be amazed!

Update, 4 May, 2012: The charges against Charles LeBlanc have been dropped after the New Brunswick Attorney General determined that Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador have all found Section 301 to be unconstitutional and that no New Brunswick court would be likely to disagree with those decisions. More information at the CBC website.

January 26, 2012

A good soundbite, but a very bad idea

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Here is one of the proposals President Barack Obama mentioned in the State of the Union speech that must have played well in the White House, but would be a terrible idea if it really was implemented:

Many soundbites sound good, but have very harmful consequences in the real world. That’s the case for President Obama’s proposal in his State of the Union Address to not allow anyone to leave school until age 18 or graduation. This proposal originated with “the National Education Association, which stands to gain from the idea a measurable boost to its dues-paying ranks, and which has in fact proposed mandatory schooling for nongraduates up to age 21.” This proposal could result in an increase in school violence by bored and frustrated 17-year-olds who hate school but are forced to attend. It would also make it even harder for teachers to maintain order in dangerous schools, contributing to an exodus of talented teachers who would rather teach than be babysitters or policemen. And it could result in truancy charges and arrests for parents who fail to get their stubborn, fully-grown offspring to attend school.

As one commenter notes, “If the union is really pushing something like this, I wonder how many of the members actually welcome it. How many teachers really want to deal with a 17 year old who doesn’t want to be in school? The type that drop out can’t be a joy to teach.” Commenting on the NEA’s ultimate desire to keep people in school until age 21 (Obama wants every American to attend college or at least get “more than a high-school diploma”), another commenter notes, “I suppose Obama would send the cops after those notoriously unproductive dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.”

January 25, 2012

The Cato Institute response to the State of the Union 2012

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

Gary Johnson responds to the State of the Union address

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:46

This was sent out from Gary Johnson’s campaign in response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech last night:

“If the idea tonight was that the President would fulfill his constitutional duty to give us ‘information of the State of the Union’, we should be able to expect some truth. I didn’t hear much truth. Truth is that the real unemployment rate is probably still above 10%. Truth is that after all the hand-wringing and deals of the past couple of years, instead of cutting spending, the President and Congress are going back to the well for another $1.2 Trillion debt limit increase. And the truth is we are seeing nothing from either the President or the Republicans that will really change any of those unacceptable realities.

“Only in the twilight zone that is Washington could a President who has bailed out and stimulated our economy to death stand in the Capitol and declare there should be ‘no bailouts, no handouts, and no cop-outs’. Can anyone spell GM or TARP or Solyndra?

“The President said we deserve a government that plays by the same rules as millions of hard-working Americans. Perhaps that should begin with the government not borrowing and printing 43 cents of every dollar it spends — something hard-working Americans can’t and don’t do.

“Until we see a real plan — not a Washington smoke and mirrors plan — that puts a stop to deficit spending and really puts America back to work, all of this rhetoric is just wasted breath.”

Gary Johnson’s campaign website is www.garyjohnson2012.com.

A unanimous Supreme Court decision against GPS tracking that still leaves wiggle room for the police

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:08

Jacob Sullum on the very narrow grounds used by the majority to decide US v. Jones:

“If you win this case,” Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben during oral argument in U.S. v. Jones last fall, “there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States.” That prospect, Breyer said, “sounds like 1984.”

Fortunately, the government did not win the case. But the Court’s unanimous decision, announced on Monday, may not delay Breyer’s 1984 scenario for long. Unless the Court moves more boldly to restrain government use of new surveillance technologies, the Framers’ notion of a private sphere protected from “unreasonable searches and seizures” will become increasingly quaint.

[. . .]

The majority therefore concluded that it was unnecessary to resolve the question of whether Jones had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” regarding his travels on public roads. By contrast, the four other justices, in an opinion by Samuel Alito, said he did, given that investigators tracked all his movements for a month — a kind of surveillance that can reveal a great deal of information about sensitive subjects such as medical appointments, psychiatric treatment, and political, religious, or sexual activities.

While Scalia’s approach draws a clear line that cops may not cross without a warrant, it does not address surveillance technologies that involve no physical intrusion, such as camera networks, satellites, drone aircraft, and GPS features in cars and smart phones. If police had tracked Jones by activating an anti-theft beacon or following his cell phone signal, they could have obtained the same evidence without touching his property.

Lorne Gunter: The long-gun registry was broken from the start

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Writing in the National Post, Lorne Gunter points out that the long-gun registry was even less useful than we thought:

Last month, the RCMP and Statistics Canada were forced to admit that they don’t keep statistics relating to the number of violent gun crimes in Canada that are committed by licensed gun owners using registered guns.

“Please note,” Statistics Canada wrote in response to an access to information request filed by the National Firearms Association, “that the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) survey does not collect information on licensing of either guns or gun owners related to the incidents of violent crime reported by police.” Nor does StatsCan’s annual homicide survey “collect information on the registration status of the firearm used to commit a homicide.”

This raises the question: Why did it take so long for the government to begin ridding Canada of the horribly expensive, unjustifiably intrusive federal gun registry? If no one in Ottawa had any systematic way of tracking whether or not Canadians suspected of committing a violent gun crime were licensed to own a gun and had registered the gun being used, then they had no way of knowing whether registration and licensing were having a positive impact on crime.

There are around 340,000 violent crimes reported to police in Canada each year. Just over 2% of those (around 8,000) involve firearms. (There’s another reason to question the initial wisdom of the gun registry: Why was Ottawa expending so much time, effort and taxpayer money on such a tiny percentage of violent crimes, while doing comparatively little to prevent the 98% of murders, robberies, kidnappings, rapes and beatings not committed with a gun?)

Even if you grant the original notion that the government had an overriding need to track gun ownership (over and above the user licensing scheme that pre-dated the registry by decades), this can only count as a waste of time, money, and effort.

January 24, 2012

SOPA Wars II: The Internet Strikes Back

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:14

Michael Geist on the remarkable results of the anti-SOPA protests:

Last week’s Wikipedia-led blackout in protest of U.S. copyright legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is being hailed by some as the Internet Spring, the day that millions fought back against restrictive legislative proposals that posed a serious threat to an open Internet. Derided by critics as a gimmick, my weekly technology law column [. . .] notes it is hard to see how the SOPA protest can be fairly characterized as anything other than a stunning success. Wikipedia reports that 162 million people viewed its blackout page during the 24-hour protest period. By comparison, the most-watched television program of 2011, the Super Bowl, attracted 111 million viewers.

More impressive were the number of people who took action. Eight million Wikipedia visitors looked up contact information for their elected representatives, seven million people signed a Google petition, and Engine Advocacy reported that it was completing 2,000 phone calls per second to local members of Congress.

The protest launched a political earthquake as previously supportive politicians raced for the exits. According to ProPublica, the day before the protest, 80 members of Congress supported the legislation and 31 opposed. Two days later, there were only 63 supporters and 122 opposed.

[. . .]

It may be tempting for SOPA protesters to declare victory, but history teaches that political wins are rarely absolute. The current Canadian legislation, Bill C-11, is much more balanced than the 2007 proposal, but the digital lock provisions that sparked the initial protest remain largely unchanged. In New Zealand, the government later introduced a more balanced bill with greater safeguards, but the prospect of terminating Internet access was not completely eliminated.

SOPA appears to be headed for the dustbin, but successor U.S. legislation is sure to follow. A political consensus on anti-piracy legislation will eventually emerge, but the day the Internet fought back will remain the elephant in the room for years to come.

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