In Poland, a civil court provides an API to file complaints and lawsuits:

the Sixth Civil Division of the Lublin-West Regional Court in Lublin, Poland, has opened its online branch. It serves the entire territory of Poland and is competent to recognize lawsuits concerning payment claims. There is basic information available in English. It has proven immensely popular, having processed about two million cases in its first year of operation. And the really cool thing is, they have an API.

As Paul Ford observes, this is eerily familiar to a scenario he penned earlier.

The Reddit community has posted a proposed piece of legislation they call The Free Internet Act on Google Docs.

Just last week I was wondering where Github for legislation was. This week, the Reddit community published a collaboratively drafted¹ “Free Internet Act’.

I haven’t read the document in whole yet, so I don’t have a clear opinion on it yet. It’s a nice stunt, however, and might change the conversation we have about net regulation.

Joel Spolsky, on Google+¹:

The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us… then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, “OK, compromise,” and gets half of what they want. That’s not the way to win… that’s the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.

The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It’s time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we’ve got. Let’s force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have.

I agree with the diagnosis. Although not completely, as the internet doesn’t always wake up when someone tries to take something away from them. The best example for that is ACTA, an international treaty, almost as bad as SOPA/PIPA, which has gone almost completely unnoticed.

And of course I agree with his proposed direction. We have to find avenues to fight for. We have to find causes to fight for. His list makes a good start, but I’d love to see this discussion furthered.

In the meantime, we desperately need a legislation tracker and early warning system. One thing that has been mentioned over and over again in the aftermath of the Jan 18th blackouts is, that legislation very similar to the one protested will be back. We better know when it’s back, then.

It’s Tuesday, bleeding into Wednesday right now and in a couple of hours, Wikipedia will go dark. And reddit. And countless other sites, big and small, in what has been touted as the nuclear option in the battle against SOPA and PIPA. This is all part of the fight against the forces that wage the war against general purpose computing and freedom of expression.

The warmongering begins. The rhetoric is there.

We’re playing defence again; having to defend our turf. Again and again. As they’re coming back with the next idea even crazier than the one before.

And I’m wondering: where are the people that play offense, what are the ideas that could be played in offense in this game for how the net will evolve?

Albert Wenger, of Union Square Ventures, in response to Vint Cerf’s Op-Ed (which was linked here as well):

the headline for my post it is not the exact inverse of Cerf’s who wrote “Internet Access” – I simply talk about the “Internet” by which I mean a set of ideas that is grounded in these original principles behind the architecture of the Internet.  At their heart all human rights are ideas and highly abstract ideas at that, such as equality and freedom.  How we concretely instantiate these ideas through legislation and social norms has changed dramatically over time and much of that change has been driven by technology.

So when I claim “The Internet is a Human Right” I mean that the legislation and social norms that we use to operationalize abstract rights such as freedom of speech should be embracing not fighting the principles of the Internet. For example, freedom of speech will be a hollow right if movie studios can make entire web sites disappear off the Internet without due process, as is currently contemplated by the legislation known as SOPA. That is the exact opposite of the principle of decentralized control.

It is in essence and extension of Cerf’s argument.

Where Cerf argues that we should focus on the intent of rights rather than their technical enablers, Wenger argues that the internet itself is not just a technology, but rather a set of principles that embody intent.

Vint Cerf, for the New York Times:

technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things.

An important piece, timed just right.

Maybe we should apply this thinking to the discussions around SOPA/PIPA etc, that is: not discussing saving existing infrastructure, but rather making explicit the goals the current infrastructure supports and enables that are worth saving.