Beyond the SOPA/PIPA Protest

Google’s objections to SOPA and PIPA are going to help of course, but they are in no way supporting free, collectivized information.  They agree that “foreign ‘rogue’ websites dedicated to copyright infringement and trademark counterfeiting” should be stopped.  They just don’t think SOPA and PIPA will do the job, and they think the proposed laws will harm tech startups that provide “the innovation and dynamism that have made the Internet such an important driver of American economic growth and job creation.”  So thinking against Google, I wonder if a strategy of active and conscious copyright infringement and trademark counterfeiting might be a good idea.  A kind of WikiLeaks aimed not at state secrets but at intellectual property.  It would certainly be a negative act of destruction, a curettage as Deleuze & Guattari say, rather than a positive act of information sharing and collectivization.  But it makes sense to suspect that both kinds of action, positive and negative, are needed to take control of the general intellect, to nourish it, and to preserve it as a common wealth.

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