For Student Journalists, Online Piracy Bill Hits Home

On Tuesday night, the editorial board of the Mt. SAC Mountaineer, the newspaper representing the state’s largest single-campus community college, had a decision to make.

The staff needed to reach consensus quickly on whether to join the myriad of websites, including Wikipedia and Reddit, that were planning an unprecedented  24 hour web protest against the contentious Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

I was part of Mt. SAC as a community college student, a former editor-in-chief of the Mountaineer and I am currently on the web team which oversees its online edition Mountiewire.com.

Hours before the planned blackout, some of our staffers had not even heard of SOPA, but through the miracle of the Internet (mostly through Facebook’s forums and live chat) a group of student editors and staffers representing the future of journalism, on their winter break or in the midst of the winter intersession,  got together in a virtual forum to plan their course of action.

It was quickly voted to take down Mountiwire.com from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. the following day.

Mountiewire is currently housed on a server independent from the school’s journalism department’s network, and it uses the Worpress content management system to deliver stories, photos and articles to the more than 30,000 students, faculty and staff enrolled at the Walnut campus.

A little past midnight I was working on the backend of the website, I had the code ready to go that would black out the site temporarily and was waiting on an editorial blurb explaining to readers who never heard of SOPA why Mountiewire was about to go dark. I hit an icon to update files…..and that’s when the website broke!

It turned out to be a combination of a technical glitch on the part of our web theme and incompatibilities with the new version of the content management system, and it wasn’t something which couldn’t be fixed with some simple swaps using file transfer protocol (yes, this is boring technical speak but bear with me). However, the knowledge the error could be reversed did not make it any less stressful.

By Wednesday morning, after a restless sleep deprived night on my end, and following countless texts, frantic phone calls and conferences with our faculty adviser, Mountiewire went back online, while concurrently a big chunk of the Internet went black.

The editorial board scrapped its original idea in favor of a well crafted editorial written by current news editor Matthew Medina. It wasn’t until almost 24 hours later, after driving back from a Walnut Valley Unified board meeting that I got to read the eloquent argument in favor of better anti-piracy legislation, advocating a bill which is less vague on numerous key points.

It seems the battle against government intrusion into one of the last global bastions of free speech and the free exchange of ideas has been won, but the war is far from over as some members of Congress have promised to revisit the issue in the future.

Perhaps youtube.com personality Boogie 2988 put it best, when he spoke not about SOPA or against PIPA as so many others had done, but in general terms about the miracle that the Internet truly represents to new generations.

The absolute greatest thing is that you can Google the video yourself and listen to his words, if you are inclined to do so. I think that’s a pretty awesome thing.