wayner.org

The SOPA/PIPA protests are in full swing. Wikipedia is dark. Flickr is pulling a shade down over some images. What about the pirate sites, the ones that will benefit the most? They're all well lighted, just like a used car lot on the edge of town. Talk about irony.

Let's say you want to get a book from O'Reilly, one of the companies that's going dark to protest SOPA and PIPA. If you ask Google to "download oreilly manuals", Google promptly takes you to oreilly.com. But in case those are dark, Google tosses in links to extratorrent.com, thepiratebay.com, and 1337x.com, all sites that are wide awake and ready to help people get free copies of O'Reilly's books. Extratorrent.com is happy to add insult to injury by putting up advertisements for "free desktop strippers" next to O'Reilly's book.

What about the other book sellers? Amazon is bumped to the second page, right next to torrentz.eu, hotfilesearch.com, torrentroom.com, ebookee.net, and sharingcenter.net. Are these sites dark? They've got ads to sell and so-called customers to help. They don't have time for stunts.

This isn't an anomaly. If you type in "download no starch press books" into Google, the search results highlight torrentz.eu, filestube.com, 4shared.com and softarchive.net. No Starch Press, one of my favorite publishers, may be dark but the book sharing sites aren't. Amazon doesn't appear until the second page and then only in an ad they bought themselves. Now that No Starch is dark, the only place to get digital copies on the front page is the pirate sites.

These kind of results are common. If you type in "download stephen king", the top result points to torrentz.eu. The author's legit site is second. What's third? Thepiratebay.org followed by torrentreactor.net. Are they dark? Of course not. As far as I can tell, only three of the ten sites on the first page help you download legit copies.

Tim O'Reilly makes the good point that publishers need to make it easy for people to buy legit copies. He also asks for a "market solution" where the good book sellers will compete and make staying honest like a walk in the park. But how can legit sites compete if they pay salaries and health insurance to the authors, editors and book designers while the torrent sites don't?

There are deep issues with SOPA, PIPA and all of the other legislation that will shut off options on the Internet. They can and will be misused. The trouble is that all laws hurt people. Putting someone in jail for burglary shuts off their first amendment right to assemble but we do it anyway. Taking away the driver's license of a drunk driver cuts them off from traveling to the vast parts of the country away from public transportation, but that doesn't mean that we just waggle a finger at drunk drivers.

The deep question for the Internet is how to deal with people who don't play by the rules and look for ways to respect the people with whom they work. The response of the pirate sites to the SOPA/PIPA protest is a good indication of what kind of people they are. Are they going dark? Are they on the barricades with Tim O'Reilly? Nope. It's just another day of showing ads for "free desktop strippers."