SOPA

Panel at Documented@Davos Transcript Documented@Davos 2012 [MUSIC PLAYING] INTERVIEWER: Welcome back to Documented@Davos, hosted by Scribd and Mashable, talking to technology leaders here at Davos, trying to figure out what the future of technology might be. Hashtag is #davosdocs. And I'm delighted to be joined by a panel of experts. We're going to be talking about SOPA, which is some legislation that's obviously been in the news very recently. To my right, we have David Drummond, chief legal officer at Google. We have Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikimedia Foundation, obviously Wikipedia being your most famous creation. We have Trip Adler, who's the CEO and founder at Scribd, which is an online document hosting service, obviously an opponent of SOPA for that reason. And we have Congressman Issa, who, if I remember correctly, opposed SOPA and also introduced OPEN, which is an alternative to SOPA which Google is in favor of. So I guess I could start by asking the congressman, we had it on our site last week, but is it true? Is SOPA really dead? Could it come back? DARRELL ISSA: Well, SOPA is radioactive. Now whether or not somebody wants to handle very enriched uranium and pay the price that comes with holding it, the odds are, no, they're not. Just yesterday, Patrick Leahy-- the author of PIPA, the equivalent of SOPA in the Senate-- has said he's taking a look at OPEN. And that is what we predicted all along. That is, if you stop them from doing overreach and really excessive work, then they'll start going back to something that will actually attack the real piracy, which we all agree has to be stopped on the internet. INTERVIEWER: So are you saying no probability of SOPA coming back? DARRELL ISSA: I would certainly think that as they look at OPEN, they'll want to try to bring in ideas or parts of SOPA. And that will be part of the challenge, to make sure that if they have reasonable requests, we look at it. But at the same time, we defeated SOPA because SOPA and PIPA were all about really eliminating creativity and stifling the internet, and, in fact, making it less safe and probably unstable. So we've got to make sure those elements don't creep back in. INTERVIEWER: And just for our audience, explain a little bit about what SOPA means and how OPEN is different. DARRELL ISSA: Well, one of the most important things that SOPA had was it had a denial of service implicit in it. And the idea that you're going to block the internet because somebody says that some portion of some site may have some

infringement-- and of course, in real time, it may not have it this moment. It may have it 10 seconds from now. And it may not have it 10 seconds afterwards. That kind of foolishness is really 19th century thinking. The other part was much more 20th century, which is it had a broad array of lawsuit capability, including, if you will, individual rights of action. So the singer in the band who may not actually own the copyright, but is performing, could have, in fact, brought litigation, either directly, in the way of a suit, or to the Justice Department. And lastly, it asked the Justice Department to try to go after this plethora of, quote, "infringers," all of whom were alleged to be overseas. But the targets that Justice could go after were all in the US. Each of those told us that this was all about wanting to, if you will, stifle the internet by making the internet do the work of, if you will, the media content people. We appreciate that their assets are on the internet and that they should not be pirated. But at the same time, look to the foreign sites that are doing it. Get injunctive relief quickly. And then follow it to the money. Stop the money. We believe that's going to clean up the internet. We think it's a good model for the world, not just for America. INTERVIEWER: David, Google opposed SOPA, is supportive of OPEN. What's the difference? Why is OPEN better? DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, let me tell you. One of the big reasons we were opposed to this is we have had in our country since the late '90s a balance with copyright that kind of works and that other countries are trying to emulate, which is embodied in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DMCA. And what it basically says, you're a copyright holder, and you're dealing with an intermediary, like an ISP or a search engine. You have to tell us that your material is being infringed. You tell us it's up there. It shouldn't be up there. It gives a notice. We take it down. Give someone else an opportunity to challenge that decision, et cetera, et cetera. That's worked really well. And so when SOPA came out, and PIPA before it, all the talk was about stopping these foreign rogue sites, and that's what we're going after. But when you actually read the bills, what they were doing was attempting to overturn this balance and this structure that has worked really well on the internet by actually trying to deputize search engines, ISPs, to either block sites entirely, to remove search results-- a technique, I should remind everybody, that was pioneered by China. They're the best practitioner of it-- and even other sites like Wikipedia and others that simply might contain a link to something that someone claims one day is infringing. And so there was this huge gulf between what the proponents of the bill said they were going after and then what the bills actually said.

 And so when we looked at the situation, we've always-- we realize that there's an issue with counterfeiting. Despite what some of the proponents, who were trying to say that Google only opposes the bill because we make all this money off of ads on pirated sites, the reverse is true. We don't want that money. We take a lot of steps to make sure that doesn't happen. Witness, if anybody's read the long complaint, indictment against Megaupload, there's a section in there that talks about how we rejected them in our advertising program several years ago. But what we do recognize is if you actually want to go after this problem, these sites are doing it for the money. So the best way to deal with it is to follow the money and get at, actually, what's sustaining them, either through the provision of ads through ad networks, like the one that we operate, or payment systems, folks who are processing the payments to these sites. And that's what the OPEN Act goes after, which is something that we support. Because we think that that's a reasonable step. And it doesn't have all of these other lawsuit capabilities that Congressman Issa was talking about and, most importantly, all of these censorship provisions, which would do enormous collateral damage to the internet. INTERVIEWER: Jimmy, Wikipedia, obviously, went down, blacked out, started a huge trend and a huge movement that ultimately helped to bring down SOPA. How did that come about? And what's your position on this new OPEN proposition? JIMMY WALES: So the way this came about is back in early December, I was starting to become more aware that SOPA seemed to be really on a fast track and was really being pushed through. And not a lot was being done to stop it. I remember watching the hearing. DARRELL ISSA: Our short hearing and long markup? JIMMY WALES: Yes. The long markup was brilliant. And actually, thank you very much, sir, for being so wordy and slowing the whole process down. Because-- DARRELL ISSA: Nothing would have stopped it except for your two websites, between your shutting off altogether and your linking and educating, it's made a huge difference. JIMMY WALES: I was talking to David today. If it hadn't taken just long enough that we went into the Christmas break, because our process, we're a very open community. So none of this is Jimmy decides to shut down Wikipedia for a day. Instead, I proposed to the community, hey, did you see what the Italians did? This law's really bad. I'm hearing from Washington that it's getting pushed through very, very quickly. I think we should consider doing a protest like the Italians.

 Opened the long conversation. We don't do these things overnight. It was a long debate, discussion in the community. What are the pros? What are the cons? And in the end, we held a vote. And it was like 87% in favor, so a massive vote within our community that we actually triggered. We're Wikipedians. We can discuss things forever. That's what we do. But actually, when Reddit announced their date, that actually clarified for me and said, OK, look, here's a date. We need to hold a vote. We just need to decide. We can discuss this forever and look for the perfect solution. But actually, Washington is coming back to work. And so we settled on that date. It was overwhelming. The foundation was supportive of the idea, so they agreed to the community's wishes and helped to create some of the technical infrastructure. The result was unbelievable. For people outside the US, you just got a message. But inside the US, you had a little tool. You could type in your zip code, your postal code, and get back your phone numbers of your congressmen and senators. And 8 million people did that. 8 million people looked up their phone numbers. Now, we don't know how many called after that. Of course-- DARRELL ISSA: Enough to shut down the switchboards. JIMMY WALES: Enough to shut down the switchboards. I want to get good confirmation on this. Because I heard that day the House of Representatives' phone system crashed. And I said, well, that sounds good. That's what I wanted to do. Because I had actually said the day before, let's melt some phones in Washington. And so we did. And so I think what was astonishing about that is that for a lot of the congresspeople, it's not their specialty area. They may not know a whole lot about it. They weren't paying that much attention to it yet. And if you hear, oh, it's some kind of squabble between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and, I don't know, Hollywood says Google is making money from piracy. And I don't know. I'm not sure what to do. But I'm against piracy. And save American jobs, right? What this did is actually transform it to say, oh, actually the public, the internet public, really cares deeply about this openness, about the fact that they can upload their videos to YouTube without somebody having to check it in advance, that they can write in Wikipedia.

And as David said earlier, the notice and takedown provisions of DMCA, they work quite well. It's a safe harbor for us. Wikipedia couldn't exist without that safe harbor. If we were responsible from the moment everything is uploaded for everything everybody does, we would have to pre-vet everything. It would take hundreds of employees. We couldn't afford it. Wikipedia would not exist. It's really important to us that we have a system in place where yeah, you can upload something that's illegal to Wikipedia, and we have a legal responsibility to take it down. We're actually even a lot more proactive than that. Our community is quite proud on moral grounds. We wrote it ourselves. Which is one of the things that irritates me when I get in a conversation with some people from Hollywood. But what about the creative people? I'm like, that's us. We created Wikipedia. We wrote it ourselves. And we took all these pictures. And maybe it's not Police Academy 8, but we think it's pretty important. So anyway, the decision came from the community, which is very powerful. I think one of the things that was powerful about it is this argument-- oh, Google just wants to make money off of piracy-- it's not true. Right? But people are like, hmm, I don't know. Is that-- I don't know. Nobody ever suggested for one second Wikipedia wants to make money off of piracy, right? I mean, god, at least we'd have a way of making money then, you know? So it sort of woke people up that, oh, actually, the public cares about this. And I think it's quite heartwarming that, you can get quite cynical about politics, that occasionally the voters do matter, which is a good thing. INTERVIEWER: Trip, Scribd also had a protest against SOPA. How would it affect your business? TRIP ADLER: So in our case, Scribd is a good example of a startup that would be really affected by SOPA. So in our case, Scribd wouldn't be able to exist if SOPA was in play. So since we first became public in 2007, we've been very conscious of copyright, complying with the DMCA. We've also gone above and beyond the DMCA, built a copyright filter where we work with publishers, let them upload their text and store a digital copy of their text. If the same thing gets uploaded, we remove it immediately. And we actually learned about SOPA maybe a month or two ago when a document on Scribd started getting really popular about how SOPA was unconstitutional. And we realized that we had missed the first wave of companies taking a stand against SOPA. So we decided to do our own protest.

 And in our case, since we were a little bit late, we wanted to do something a little more creative. So when people first hit the site, we had all of the words on the page begin to disappear with this kind of cool effect. And it actually got quite a bit of attention. And in our case, the goal was really just to educate people on what SOPA was. Because this was over a month ago when it wasn't being talked about quite as much. So we gave people more information about what SOPA was. And following our protest, there seemed to be a much bigger wave of protests, ending with the tidal wave created by Wikipedia. JIMMY WALES: Since he called radioactive earlier, I wanted to say it wasn't a tidal wave. It was the nuclear option. TRIP ADLER: OK, the nuclear bomb dropped by Wikipedia. DARRELL ISSA: But it's made a change that I think, as a member of Congress, is profound, and it's forever. And that is, the next time the content community comes with a prepackaged bill that they've written, every office is going to say, and how does the tech community feel about it? And they're going to ask for-- obviously, there's no one voice. But they're going to ask that question. The reason this legislation came so close to passing-- voted unanimously with Republicans and Democrats, people who got off the bill once they found out what they'd already voted for, amazingly-- was because there was sort of an assumption that Hollywood always wins. And Hollywood has, historically, always won. But in this case, they were really wrong in what they were asking for. And my goal with the OPEN Act with Senator Wyden and others, Zoe Lofgren out of San Jose, is we need to make sure that they do win, but they win appropriately. We want to protect against piracy because everybody who-- and we saw it. The 7,000 sites that went down, in one way or the other, every one of them has a huge amount of intellectual property. Their names. They resolve to a name. That is crucial to them that it be theirs and they be able to protect it. So the amazing thing is we want to represent the 7,000 every bit as much as the others. And we think one bill can do it for both. INTERVIEWER: You just hinted at an issue that came up on our site a few times. Is there a disconnect in terms of technical knowledge among your peers in terms of these new bills coming along? Do they fully understand them? Do they fully understand the technological implications? DARRELL ISSA: As far as I know, the only person who has written software and made money at it is Blake Farenthold of Texas, a freshman on my committee. And he

made enough money that that's what he spent getting elected. It really is pretty rare. Internet entrepreneurs have not yet come to Congress. Doctors are coming to Congress in mass numbers after health care reform. But it is one of our challenges, the amount of people that when you say "Cerf," they know who he was, not what you do, or that when you say "IPv4," actually get what it really means. But they're learning. And they're learning as a result of this, that trying to block domains, trying to have a denial of service on how something resolves from four or six groups of numbers, they kind of go, OK, I don't really need to know about that. I'm not going to learn how to talk in hex, either. But I get it that this is critical that you be able to go to sites all over the world and easily resolve to a name. That's why the magic works. Congressmen, and particularly their staffs, do care about this issue now. And I know for David, when Google and other tech companies come in, and they want to talk about technology and the internet, there will be a go-to staff person in 435 house offices and 100 senate offices, as there never was before. And that's a huge tidal change. INTERVIEWER: David, we just hinted at the issue as well. There's a lot of money behind these bills. Is the tech industry lobbying hard enough? Can we be doing more proactively? DAVID DRUMMOND: Sure. It's a great question. And I think what Congressman Issa was saying, is this was kind of a watershed moment. I think he's absolutely right about that. What's been going on is the content industry, for example, on Capitol Hill has been playing the traditional Washington game with contributions and so forth for a long, long time. And whatever you feel about our system-- I happen to be somebody who thinks we ought to do some reforming about how this all operates. We can have big debates on that. But whatever you feel about it, if you're in business, and you really care about the world and your users and laws that might come out, you have to be involved in that, right? So Google, you see lots of the companies that have started to do that in a bigger way than historically we've done before. But there's a lot of catching up to do. We started Google 13 years ago. So we're not very old. Facebook, YouTube, well, YouTube's part of Google now. But all of our companies are very young. So the notion that we'd be able-- through political action committees and donations and all these kinds of things-- to match what Hollywood has been able to do over all of these years is just questionable.

So we've been doing-- the two things that we had lacked before this fight, I think, was number one, a coalition. One of the reasons they're so effective in Hollywood is you have the Motion Picture Association. You have the Record Industry Association of America. So individual companies are part of that. And they have a very strong-- and they all walk in lockstep. And they agree. We've never had such an organization. We've had Net Coalition. We've been trying to build that. I think what you saw here was the web community, not only driven by web users and what the public wants, but the organizations, whether it is Wikimedia to Facebook to Twitter to Google, all coming together. And out of this, I think we have now the prospects of a lasting coalition that will give us a bigger voice in Washington. But the second part, that was even a bigger deal, was, whether you call it the nuclear option or whatever it is. But it was mobilizing the users. And that's something that web companies, we've had this possibility. And we've seen glimpses of it in the past. But here's an example where it really happened. And that, I think, is a big equalizer. INTERVIEWER: Well, Congressman, is it an equalizer? Is it an antidote? To what extent can money influence these bills getting passed? And to what extent can things like what Jimmy started and what Trip started, can these social movements really be powerful enough to be the antidote to money coming in and pushing through a bill? DARRELL ISSA: I don't want to understate the importance of money. I think everyone gets it that that's part of the process of politics at all levels. But money normally gets you access. Access gets you education. Education builds over time. The tech community, if I went to a Google fundraiser in the past, you know what they wanted to talk about? H-1B visas, high tech visas, primary education, free trade issues. In other words, they wanted to talk about things that were broadly good for America. I've never been lobbied that I can recall-- and I'm pretty sure I recall them all-- I've never been lobbied by a tech company based on something that was sort of tech, per se. That's one of the challenges. And I'm the past chairman of the Consumer Electronics Association. When we had the fight with the Motion Picture Association over the very recording that at that time was Betamax, oddly enough. And now it's morphed generation after generation. The idea that you could do it went all the way to the Supreme Court in this Motion Picture Association v. Sony Betamax case. This was before Sony had as many movies. But the fact was that mobilized our industry. And the consumer electronics industry never forgot. And they've continued to support copyrights rights acts and fair use.

This industry, if you will, broadly, the internet users and entrepreneurs, need to build over time. It's all about the internet, not about our company. And that means the internet day on the Hill, which does not yet exist, being something that's broadcast on websites and that brings perhaps 1,000 or 10,000 small, medium, and large and emerging entrepreneurs to simply say, don't screw up the net. And we have these issues, and you need to help us. That broad coalition is more powerful than any amount of money, because it's how you get to educate a member. One way, historically, is you write him a check. He comes to the event. You tell him about your issues. It's effective in Washington. It's not nearly as effective as sort of occupy people's offices with real, live people from the district. And that's what I think is going to come out of this is the kind of annual grassroots "save the net." And Jimmy, you probably have more to do with making sure it happens. Hollywood people, they bring in movie stars. They bring in rock stars. That's part of it, too. You're a rock star on the net. If you say, I'm coming here on this day, and I want people who care about the net to be there, they'll be there. And not because there's a single bill, but because there will always be another bill that Congress is thinking about that will screw up innovation. INTERVIEWER: Well, David, is there a case for the tech industry being more proactive about these things? And what do you see as the probability of a new bill coming along? DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, I think that's what we're saying. If you have a coalition, and we're actually working together, as Congressman Issa says, to protect the internet at large and not looking at it in the parochial interests of our own companies. Because we've seen some of that. Because we have different-- some are social networks. Some are search engines. Some do other things. And we haven't come together. This has brought everybody together. And I think if that's lasting, we're going to be able-- we're going to have early warning systems. We'll know what's happening. And we'll be much more proactive. Look, I think there will be more attempts to do this, and not just in the US. One of the things I wanted to make a-- not directly answering your question. But I wanted to make sure we covered the international implications of this fight.

INTERVIEWER: Well, as I was just saying earlier to you, in the spirit of this kind of bottom up movement, we posted to our social networks earlier today asking, what would our community ask you guys. And the thing that came up in over 50% of the comments was ACTA, which has just been signed in Poland today, I believe. Poland has just signed on to it. What is ACTA? Should we be concerned? Is it on the same level as SOPA? Maybe you could give us some back story. And obviously, the international-- DAVID DRUMMOND: I think the congressman could probably give a good overview. DARRELL ISSA: And as a member of Congress, it's more dangerous than SOPA. It's not coming to me for a vote. And in fact, it purports that it doesn't change existing laws. Well, it very cleverly says, well, within existing laws, these things were already wrong. But once implemented, it creates a whole new enforcement system. And it virtually will tie the hands of Congress to undo it. Because, in a sense, you're in this international agreement. Therefore Congress is told, well, you can't do this. You're being a bad global citizen. Well, quite frankly, that's why treaties are supposed to be ratified by the Senate. So that's what makes ACTA very dangerous. It sounded probably to people like a good idea. But people should have asked, why did they work around the WTO and around all the other existing bodies? And I think the answer is because they could work in secret. They could get it done. And then they could tell people you couldn't change it. And that's what we're afraid of with ACTA. INTERVIEWER: What will ACTA do? How will it affect the web? DARRELL ISSA: Well, many of the things in SOPA are basically implied in ACTA. I mean-- DAVID DRUMMOND: I would say that the censorship provisions are not as-- there aren't explicit censorship provisions. But it talks in broad ways which could lead you to believe that a country fulfilling its obligations under ACTA could come up with blocking, for instance, as one of the mechanisms. And so we were concerned about this all along. But again, this was a project that was done in secret. It didn't get a lot of notoriety. INTERVIEWER: Well, but Google has been opposed to ACTA.

DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah, we were opposed to it. DARRELL ISSA: But you had to get a copy of it. And that was hard for you to get. DAVID DRUMMOND: That's right. It was very hard. This has all been disclosed now. But some of the companies were able to get a copy and see what was in there. And we pushed back. And actually, there's language in ACTA, if you see it, about at least respecting free expression. That had to be put in there. That wasn't in there from the beginning. INTERVIEWER: So is this the start? Because I checked our social accounts earlier today. And it was ACTA all over, and people really wanting to know more about this. It seems like the movement that was opposed to SOPA is now suddenly turning its attention, just waking up to this reality. I'm just seeing it in the news today. Jimmy, do you think there is perhaps going to be a social movement behind this? Might we see Wikipedia blacking out again? JIMMY WALES: Well, I hope we won't see Wikipedia blacking out again, because I really, really like Wikipedia. I missed it that day. DARRELL ISSA: And people were trying to look up the leaders on each side of this issue. And they couldn't find out who we were. JIMMY WALES: So I do think there is a building social movement around this. And in fact, one of the things that I think is interesting about this whole thing is, again, if we think of it as Silicon Valley versus Hollywood, we're missing the point of the users. The users of the internet care very deeply about these issues. And for something like ACTA, I think there's a much deeper political point that people are going to get very upset about. And that is this idea that these kinds of rules are being passed in secret where even companies that are affected can't even get a copy of it without a lot of rigmarole. Where we all think-- I remember in school when I learned that the Senate ratifies treaties. And all of a sudden, I hear, well, I can't complain to my congressman because my congressman has nothing to do with it. And in Europe, it's this similar-- it's a bad situation. And I think that kind of thing is to say, wait, there's something fundamentally wrong with the way these agreements are put into place that is undemocratic, that is counter to the overwhelming spirit of the age, which is, ask Mubarak in Egypt, right? Which is that people are demanding to be heard. We want openness, transparency. We want a dialogue, a discussion, a real genuine debate, and not even necessarily, I think, within the internet community. I think

there's quite a healthy and interesting debate about what should copyright be and how do all these things work. And it's not driven by partisan, moneyed interests and so forth. It's people going, yeah, actually, what should we do about this? This is really interesting. And of course, you get voices that are extreme on either side. But this kind of agreement, ACTA, never mind the details of it. It's that agreements like this can happen with so little democratic oversight that I think is going to really energize people. Because I think most people don't know it. They just don't realize how this stuff works. INTERVIEWER: Well, Congressman, is there something that people can do? Obviously, the Wikipedia blackout gave people something to rally around and to talk about on their social networks. If people are concerned about ACTA, where can they go? What can they do? DARRELL ISSA: Well, first of all, a Google search will get you an awful lot to read. But one of the things that's going to happen, speaking sort of for the body I belong to, we're holding a series of hearings. ACTA's going to be part of it. The whole question of, how do you get it right, and what has already been done in advance, and quite candidly, what's being done in other countries? Because there are millions of points, but there's only one web. And so any country that's taken unilateral action begins to erode the overall value of the web. And if you shut down my access to something in Italy, you shut down my access to the web piece by piece. And we already mentioned, David said it very well. Look, China already has been doing things that cause many players to say, I won't be there because what you're doing is wrong. And we need to make sure that the rest of the First World, if you will-- in the sense of people who generally are better players and international players than China has been-- find themselves not doing the same thing. Because it empowers China to say, you're doing it. Of course what we're doing is the same thing. Hearings are going to happen. Senator Leahy has said he's going to look at OPEN. We're going to try and look at the entire process. Now I'm hoping that the House Judiciary Committee, which held one hearing, ordered one company to be there to be whipped while the others were there to object, is going to make-- DAVID DRUMMOND: I will admit that was us. DARRELL ISSA: Fortunately, you were unavailable. DAVID DRUMMOND: Yes.

 DARRELL ISSA: But the fact was it was not the kind of hearing I'm proud of. And I've been a member of that committee for 11 years. And it is the constitutional committee to boot. But it has agreed to hold hearings. Hopefully, we're going to see a number of these hearings on people's First Amendment rights. Not just protecting the First Amendment one way of, if you will, the implied right of a free press to protect its assets. How about the right of a people to have access to information? And we're going to hold a series of them in the Oversight Committee because we have the authority to do it. And Ways and Means, which is one of the most powerful committees, now has put their staff directly on the trade issue of getting it right. And that's where ACTA is really going to get questioned is, is this an overall bad trade policy to the committee that actually approves and negotiates these trade agreements? INTERVIEWER: So would I be right in concluding that there is a new movement starting, that this group that has kind of coalesced around SOPA is now looking towards the kind of issues that Jimmy mentions, which is around secrecy, around the public really demanding access to these things before they become a reality? Will Google be getting involved in any of this stuff around ACTA going forward? DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, look, we have been opposed to it from early on. I think that what you're seeing here is these two things go in hand, an open internet, and transparency in the governance of the internet, and transparency in legislative and other kinds of political processes that are going to impact the internet. They go hand in hand. And I think what you're seeing is people are saying, at the end of the day, we want the internet to remain open. And we're going to, because the internet is-- we're going to use it to make sure that our elected officials let us know what's going on and are accountable for doing things to it. INTERVIEWER: Jimmy, I'm not sure we got your opinion yet on OPEN. Are you supportive of OPEN? JIMMY WALES: Unfortunately, I don't know enough about OPEN. One of the great benefits of not being a politician is I am not required to have an opinion on such things. DARRELL ISSA: Please will develop one in time, though. JIMMY WALES: I will develop one in time. In due course, I will develop one. I haven't had a chance to read it or really dig. I've been busy, you know, shutting down Wikipedia.

INTERVIEWER: Isn't there just a big switch? JIMMY WALES: Yeah. No, I think-- it's not just a big switch, no. Actually, our staff was amazing. They put in long hours making sure everything went smoothly. There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of ways to get it wrong. We didn't want to break everything. For me, what I plan to do is I do want to continue having some kind of a leadership role with the internet community. I'm thinking of how to do that. What I'd like to do is bring together the voices of the internet community as a participant in this, as an equal participant, so that we don't end up in a situation where it's a handful of companies lobbying Congress from different industries, which I think is fine. Certainly, I hope Google will do everything they can to defend the net and their own interests. But I think that there needs to be an organization of this energy online for some of these broader issues that aren't just about the internet, but are really about good governance, about what we expect from how governments function. And I think there's a huge opportunity here, as we've seen. We've seen the Arab Spring. I guess we could call this the Hollywood Spring. And I think there should be a lot more "springs." And I hope that I can play at least some small role in helping that happen. TRIP ADLER: So as an internet entrepreneur, I think it's great that we're having these conversations online about SOPA. But one thing that I don't think is getting discussed enough is the benefits that the internet has brought to Hollywood and other content producers. Because if you look at, let's take music, for example, from what I can tell, piracy has dropped dramatically over the last 10, 10-plus years, right? If you go from the Napster days to the iTunes days and now to the Spotify days, people are just paying more and more for content. And piracy is, meanwhile, diminishing. And it's sometimes hard to use our imagination. But there's probably another step beyond Spotify that will only deliver a better user experience to people which will get them to contribute more dollars to help the content owners. So I would like to think that we can continue to just develop the web going forward and maybe take a longer-term perspective, and realize that if we look forward as opposed to backwards, we can innovate our way to a solution that's good for users, and for the internet, and for content owners. INTERVIEWER: I'd love to get your thoughts, just wrapping up, on next steps and where we go from here. And Congressman, you had some thoughts there. DARRELL ISSA: Well, one thought I wanted to get in is when we put the OPEN Act out, we put it on what we call Madison, named for the president, as an open bill. And

it was a little bit of a learning curve, quite frankly a little bit like Wikipedia. Because we didn't know who was going to be a genuine amender and who was going to be there for mischief. And we allowed the bill to have something beyond just public comment, actually allow people to offer their comments, be identified as an author, saying, I think you should change this. And then people could look and say, who was it that said this? And they could question their motives and so on. We think that that's part of the open process is that if you can't come to Washington and have a lobbyist, but there's a piece of legislation, being able to question it, being able to amend it or propose an amendment. We had about 11 amendments that went into the next generation of draft bill that now technically has a number. So we think that's part of the process. SOPA would not have ended up being rushed in if each time before the secret versions showed up, if these had actually been open for genuine public access for a period of time. And I don't mean a PDF posted somewhere. I mean an interactive, available document where people can make comments and the others can, too. TRIP ADLER: A PDF could be OK. DARRELL ISSA: No, but PDF is not OK when you want to say, this line, this place, this problem. And then you want people to easily be able to mark it up. There are tools to make PDF look like something else. TRIP ADLER: We're working on that. DARRELL ISSA: And please do. But we all-- and I'll use Wikipedia because Jimmy's here and I want to suck up to him. I am a politician, after all. Really, Jimmy, what you've been able to do, to have open sites, then sites that are a little less open because they've been subject-- and then ultimately, like the president's site where, make all the comments you want. It's not going to change quickly. Was a learning curve of how to create total openness but then protect against mischief. Congress needs to get there. We need to have that total openness. That's one of the projects that I'm hoping the internet community will say, we want to help get Congress more open. We want to demand they do the tools. But we want to help them get to those tools. And that's a challenge. Because I've been pushing a very well-cooked wet noodle trying to get this technology. Last year, by the end of the year, we had finally gotten to where we were streaming all the committees' hearings so that people could stream them and download most

of them from archives. So that when you hear something happened in Congress, you can go get it. The next generation has to be, no, somebody's saying something now. And I want to be able to online, quickly, ask a few questions and see what Darrell Issa or John McCain or somebody else said six years ago in a committee hearing. That's where we're going to get open governments and responsiveness. Because I guarantee you, making us accountable for what we said in committees and subcommittee activities, or for that matter, just knowing what somebody else said, will allow the public to make a difference in how politicians act when no one's looking. No one's looking at subcommittee hearings. If you put them online, they will be looking then. And the same thing with our bills. And that's a challenge for the internet. INTERVIEWER: Jimmy, some thoughts on next steps? You see this openness coming to bear any time soon? JIMMY WALES: I think in steps, actually, it is happening. It's sort of funny, actually. I just realized that I was watching some of the markup. It was streaming. And that's actually remarkable, and it's amazing. I just assumed it existed when I went to look for it. It's kind of surprising that it exists, now that I stop to think about it for a minute. But those kinds of steps-- DARRELL ISSA: Thanks to a nonprofit, it does exist. JIMMY WALES: So those are the kinds of steps. And I do think there is an increasing groundswell of public opinion around these kinds of issues, that people do feel like, if you look at the approval rating of Congress, I'm sorry to have to say, it's like 5%. I just saw the most recent numbers. Now, for some reason, people do like-- DARRELL ISSA: We'll go lower. We can go lower. JIMMY WALES: People do like their own congressman. They just hate Congress as a whole, which sounds paradoxical. I think that is true. But I actually think it's not as paradoxical as it sounds. It's perfectly OK to say, I like this person. Actually, I like all of them individually. But the system is actually broken. And it's broken in ways that lead to this lack of transparency. And bad decision-making happens. And I think there is a ripe movement here for true reform. INTERVIEWER: Can the web community create that degree of change? With SOPA, we had something very specific. Everyone was focused. And when you have these large, distributed groups, can we solve complex problems like this one?

 JIMMY WALES: Well, I think some of the challenges we have is that some of these issues are actually incredibly boring. If you really want to know-- DARRELL ISSA: You want to talk about postal reform? We've got all night. JIMMY WALES: Yeah, exactly. Or even how are these trade agreements negotiated? And how does this pass, and what does it all mean? It's really complicated and quite boring. It's easy enough to mobilize 10 million people to contact Congress by saying, look, Wikipedia's dark today because something really bad is about to happen. Please let the Congress know about it. It's a lot harder to get sustained interest, even if in the abstract, people say, yes, I want to see a better governance system here. And that's a challenge. But there are always political activists. There's a lot of political energy out in the world that hasn't been harnessed because we've gone from-- there was an era when politics was about really grassroots, door-to-door campaigning. And then through technology, we got to the broadcast era, and politics became broadcast. And it's all about the sound bite. I think we are now coming back finally to, as we go from broadcast media, broadcast politics, participatory media, participatory politics. That there are new ways that people can get involved. And if you feel like, it doesn't matter. I shouldn't be an activist because whatever. It's all going to be a TV debate. People are going to vote based on that. Instead, if you feel like, oh, actually, I can have an impact. I can change things. I can organize my friends in a way that's actually meaningful. I think that is a growing trend. And I think it's something that we should all think about. What are the tools that we need to build in our community to allow us to do that? INTERVIEWER: David, a final thought on where we go from here? DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah. Taking a slightly different direction on next steps, I think we should also remember that the legislative route on this piracy issue is not the only route to try to figure this thing out. You heard Trip talk about how his company had already created a way to-- through technical means, because they have smart engineers in his company-- figure out how they can solve this by matching a reference sample of text that the copyright holder gives them to what somebody tries to upload. We do the absolute equivalent thing on YouTube. We figured out a way to get snippets that we get from the content owners. And then we match it. And things don't go up if it matches.

 There are ways to deal with these problems with technology and being smart about it, where we don't actually have to have legislation where we're not really sure what the outcome's going to be. So I think that one next step could be, with this dying down and us adopting a legislative approach that we are comfortable is not going to have all this ancillary damage, that we could produce conversations among startups and bigger companies and so forth with Hollywood about how we can solve some of this stuff without the political fights. INTERVIEWER: And that's a great note to end it on. So Congressman Issa, Trip Adler, Jimmy Wales, David Drummond, thanks for joining us at Documented@Davos with Scribd and Mashable. You can find out more at scribd.com, also mashable.com, M-A- S-H-A-B-L-E, where I'm sure the conversation will continue on issues such as SOPA and ACTA. Thanks for joining us at Davos. That hashtag is #davosdocs. [MUSIC PLAYING]