Co-founded by Alexis Ohanian, the website Reddit went black during the SOPA debate. Reddit founder: SOPA showed democracy works

Social news website Reddit, Wikipedia and scores of other smaller websites that went dark in protest of anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA helped turn the inside-the-Beltway lobbying racket on its head, Reddit’s co-founder Alexis Ohanian told POLITICO.

The outcry from Internet users proved “that Americans actually still can dictate policy and not just lobbyists,” Ohanian said, during a visit to Washington this week.


“It’s motivating because this was a decentralized movement. Lots of people with great ideas started contributing and it started to get momentum,” Ohanian added. “This idea went viral. It’s powerful when you think we’ve now hit this critical mass. We can get a message out there that actually affects politicians.”

While the Reddit team had talked behind the scenes about shutting down the website for a day in protest to the bills moving through Congress, Ohanian said it was the calls from the site’s users to take the drastic move that ultimately convinced the company to black out the site for the day. In an unprecedented move, Wikipedia and thousands of other sites participated in the blackout and Google also blocked out its colorful logo to show opposition to the bills.

The Web blackouts added more fuel to the anti-SOPA and PIPA movement on Twitter and Facebook, leading to bill co-sponsors reversing their support and scores of other lawmakers releasing statements condemning the legislation.

Ohanian, who was in town to give a speech to law students at Howard University, didn’t rule out the prospect of blacking out the site again. If the community of users calls for it, Reddit would consider taking the same move again, he said. But he was quick to add that “the Internet at large realizes that blackouts are the sort of thing that lose their value the more often you do them.”

Ohanian said that online piracy is a problem, but one that could be dealt with through market-based solutions rather than a just a legislative one. Reddit is owned by Conde Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications, and is based in New York.

“Looking to things like Netflix, looking to things like Spotify, it’s clear that if you can provide access to this content earlier and or better than the pirates, you can actually win; you can actually make money and continue growing your business using this new model,” he said.

The authors of the two bills, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), panned the blackouts as a publicity stunt aimed at sparking fear among the public. They argued the bills would not impact Wikipedia or Reddit, just foreign sites that were dedicated to violating copyrights.

In a statement released a day before the protests, Smith noted SOPA “will not harm Wikipedia, domestic blogs or social networking sites. This publicity stunt does a disservice to its users by promoting fear instead of facts.”

Former Sen. Chris Dodd, the chief of the Motion Picture Association of America, echoed similar sentiments, calling the blackouts a “gimmick.” He also alleged the Web companies were tampering with the facts to protect their own business interests.

“It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests,” he said in a statement released last month.

Ohanian responded to the criticism as “a very clear example of 20th century thinking versus 21st century thinking.”

“If the Internet decided that we wanted to do something inappropriate … we’re open source so someone would download the source code and launch Reddit somewhere else. The cost of doing that is trivial,” he said in the interview. “So many of these critics are interested in preserving a kind of scarcity that their businesses have relied on instead of adapting to a new technology.”

While artists and content creators are hurt by piracy online, Ohanian made the case that the Internet is a platform of opportunity for them to reach a wider audience and gain a larger following.

“There’s a trade-off because if you had been an artist at a time when you didn’t have this platform to share, there’s a good chance that no one saw it. But now no matter where you’re living, as long as you have an Internet connection you can get something started that literally millions of people will see every day,” he said. “To all of them I would encourage what folks like Justin Bieber and Ashton Kutcher have been saying, which is there is a model here that works and it works really well for artists. It means that there are no more gatekeepers.”

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