I didn’t get a chance to see all of the speakers at Seattle’s IN-NW social media conference at the Showbox in SoDo, but I did have the opportunity to see the founder of the Cheezburger Network, Ben Huh, speak out about SOPA and Internet copyright law.

Obviously, Ben Huh has a vested interest in keeping the Internet copyright-free, but that doesn’t mean that the charismatic speaker wasn’t correct about SOPA or Internet copyright law. He talked about the law trying to block users from linking back to other sites containing copyrighted material and how some lobbyists were trying to frame the issue differently.


Ben Huh said that SOPA was brought down (for the time being) by the entirely magic number of 90,000 phone calls per day, mostly from angered teenagers who couldn’t access Wikipedia. He likened the fight against SOPA and Internet copyright law to the biblical fight of David versus Goliath and said that more Davids were needed to join together to fight the forces that would like nothing more than to limit government access.

Other issues were raised probably affect Cheezburger as well; one way that the government is talking about limiting net access would be to charge consumers more for the bandwidth that companies like Netflix are already paying for. No consumer likes the old-fashioned double-charge strategy, which is why this action is getting so much attention.

The black-out by Wikipedia and other major Internet sites definitely caught the attention of the American public, who in turn voiced their concern to congress.

Ben Huh’s talk was interesting in that it highlighted the increased power of the people in the digital age. Grassroots protests were much harder to organize before the Internet and are now much easier.

I also liked his idea of figuring out how many phone calls are needed to jam the congressional phone lines. When the people (and Wikipedia) sought to stop SOPA, their voices were heard much faster than they would have been otherwise.

Ben Huh’s talk reinforced the idea that the freedom that we have on the Internet is in jeopardy by the powers that be. However, the truth that the “little guy” has more power to fight back means that I hope the so-called little guys and gals (whatever their truthful size may be) can join together to take back more power, both on and off the Internet.