Internet Piracy, a Black-Out, Two Bills and Your Research: A Teachable Moment

The internet has been abuzz the past few days about proposed legislation aimed at preventing online piracy in the United States. The bills, with short names PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), have garnered heated debate from many varied view points of media distributors, politicians, economists, legal professionals, consumer rights advocates, anyone who uses the internet, and yes, even librarians.

I’m going to side-step the political, social, ethical, legal, and intellectual property issues these two bills bring up. Instead, I’m going to use them as a teachable moment to highlight some of our resources that can help our students find resources on current topics from multiple viewpoints.

To point out why this is important, I want to start by showing you what I found in the first results of a Google search for “SOPA and PIPA”:

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First off, note that there are ads by Google. If you visited Google yesterday you may have noticed a blacked out box of text in the upper left corner of the screen. Google participated, along with Wikipedia, in a media black-out in protest of these bills. I wonder what sort of information Google is going to display then about these bills? Yes. Even Google can be biased in what results and ads you see first.

Now let’s look at the first news results we see from Google. They are all from US newspapers and have similar headlines.

Wikipedia’s page explaining SOPA and advocating for opposition comes up next.

 

 

This could be helpful information if you’re just starting to learn about these topics. But what if you wanted to find different views about the bills? It took me quite a bit of scrolling through the thousands and thousands of results I got in Google to find any other view than opposition to these bills. And I still wasn’t even sure I understood what the bills actually said.  (The fastest way to find the text of either bill is to type this into Google-  “PIPA site:.gov” or “SOPA site:.gov”.)

 

Now let’s look at a search I did in a Walden database for news articles. First, why am I looking for news articles and not scholarly, peer-reviewed articles? Well, because it takes time for those scholarly, peer-reviewed articles to be researched, reviewed, and published. This topic is happening right now! News articles are all that will be available to me because they are published every single day.  No, they are not scholarly sources. But they are sometimes the only source on a current event.

Just because news articles aren’t scholarly doesn’t mean I should not think critically about which articles I use. I want to find different view points on these bills, not just all articles in which the author presents an opposing view. To ignore the other side of the argument is to do pretty lazy research. Even if I don’t agree with the other view, I need to address it. That makes what I am saying about the topic that much stronger that I could analyze and poke holes in the other side’s arguments. Or maybe I’ll present both views equally in my argument and conclude that both views are flawed. Regardless, it’s important to present both sides when researching a current controversial issue.

Here’s that search for news articles I did in the database called LexisNexis Academic:

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I can immediately see the newspapers that are represented in my results.  I can also click on the newspaper name to see the articles from that specific paper.

I also see a variety of headlines and possible views presented within the articles.

Also note that these are not all papers from within the U.S. Since these bills have a lot to do with foreign internet sites, it only makes sense to pay attention to the different ways reporters from other countries might handle the issue.

 

 

Other databases to try for newspaper or magazine articles on a current topic not yet to be found in peer-reviewed literature would be Academic Search Complete/Premier and ProQuest Central.

Don’t forget some of our other subject specific databases also have newspapers and/or magazines in them too, like Business Source Complete/Premier (to find out what the business world has to say about this) or Education Research Complete (educators are talking too!).

 Now you know about some resources to use when researching a “current event” topic that is controversial. Because there are no peer-reviewed articles on such a recent topic, it’s all the more important to find balance of viewpoints and think critically about the sources you’re using.  I hope this gives you a good sense of how important bias can be in research and some things to think about for your next research topic!

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