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SOPA's Potential Upshot: A Chat With Vlad Teichberg

"SOPA would kill off Facebook. It would kill off YouTube. We'll be forced to start using decentralized conduits."

Vlad Teichberg can’t stop looking toward the door. As a curator with globalrevolution.tv, arguably the online aggregate for live video feeds from populist demonstrations from around the world, Teichberg is no stranger to constant snoopage and harassment. On January 2, portions of GlobalRev’s sprawling Bushwick studio were subject to an early morning raid carried out by a gaggle of armed officials from a Manhattan Task Force. Teichberg and five others were tossed in jail. The entire debacle played out live on video, of course, after which Teichberg, a former Wall Street derivatives trader, says some $16,000 in donations came pouring into GlobalRev.

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And so now, two weeks later, we’re cooped up with Teichberg at GlobalRev’s original studio, a ramshackle, humming wire nest near Lafayette and Bleecker. It’s the sort of place where for every empty coffee cup or pack of smokes there are five Hackintosh laptops at the ready to strengthen GlobalRev’s mesh of 80-plus real-time video editors scattered around the world. It all winds Teichberg’s clock. He truly is something straight out of Neuromancer. Just sitting and watching him do his thing is tiring.

But his eyes constantly shift. “They could come here and try and shut this place down, too,” he tells us, looking again toward the door, then back at the countless tabs of live feeds and chat windows screaming out from two large monitors. “No place is safe. But we don’t care.” He says he’s not paranoid. And that the Stop Online Piracy Act, that contentious bit of legislation that a growing legion of opponents say would straight up nuke the Internet, would be toxic to the free flow of information. But as we come to realize, Teichberg’s view on SOPA is nuanced, doing away with some of the traditional Kill SOPA noise coming out of, say, the Reddit masses.

We want to hear more.

Will Globalrevolution.tv go black on Wednesday?

We’re global. If shit really goes down, if stuff really starts happening globally on Wednesday for whatever reason, we’ll not necessarily go black. But notwithstanding something really big happening overseas, we’ll go black. That’s just in solidarity with a lot of other people doing similar kinds of actions. I think at this point, given the exposure SOPA has received, that it’s actually a good example: When you shine a bright light at something, the roaches scatter. Although, that’s not necessarily true. The administration sort of came out against the National Defense Authorization Act, which they signed in the dead of night on Dec. 31.

But I think the more important thing we’re going to have to ask ourselves is to what degree should ideas be private property? I think under the lobbying pressure of all these corporations that are basically engaged in the trading of content that we’re going a little far in assigning private property to ideas to the degree that we’re gonna stifle progress. Because the way human progress works is that someone comes up with an idea, then that idea gets improved and incorporated into something else, and then a new idea comes up, and so on.

If you stop that, you’re gonna stop progress. If the people who want to create that kind of a system succeed, all that’s gonna happen is it’s gonna make the U.S. very, very uncompetitive compared to the rest of the world. You can try and sensor things. Censorship has never worked for anyone. It didn’t work for the Soviets. It didn’t work for the Inquisition, when they burned all the books. In general it doesn’t work.

Read the rest at Motherboard.