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We must defeat SOPA: Tech at Night Special

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 15th, 2011 at 03:30 AM  | 

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Tech at Night

Ordinarily I use Tech at Night to cover a variety of topics that come my way, and I have them in my queue for tonight. But with over 30 items to consider and integrate, most of them on SOPA, I’m shelving the rest for Friday, and discussing just one topic tonight: We must defeat SOPA in the House. It is entirely unacceptable, and I believe worthy of primary challenges, for any Republican to back this bill. I’m going to make a list, and I’m going to make noise about this. I hope you do, too.

SOPA is the Stopping Online Piracy Act, the House’s counterpart to the Senate PROTECT IP act. SOPA contains a grab bag of provisions intended to stop copyright, trademark, and patent infringements abroad, but Title I of the bill is intolerable, fails to achieve its goals, and creates a massive power grab online for this man by applying unaccountable censorship and regulation to Americans on the Internet.

That’s right. Eric Holder has been dreaming of censoring the Internet since 1999, and House Republicans are thinking of giving him that power. At the time, the crisis that was the excuse for this censorship attempt was the murder plot at Columbine High School in Colorado. Now the excuse is that kiddies online are downloading Scary Movie 3, and buying fake hand bags. Give me a break.

Copyrights, trademarks, and patents matter. If we have a way to protect them from foreign attacks without overstepping our bounds, we should consider doing it. SOPA is not that way to do it. Watch any Republican who dares vote for this garbage, voting to put Hollywood over us, to give Eric Holder the power to bend over backward for Barack Obama’s Hollywood donors over the interests of everyone with a job created thanks to the Internet.

Disgraced former Senator Chris Dodd may say the MPAA is pro-Internet, but as the head of the MPAA it’s his job to say that. He’s lucky he head a fallback after he was forced to retire by the Countrywide scandal he was neck-deep in.

You know who’s more credible about Internet censorship than the MPAA? People who made their fortunes online. The founders of Google, Craig’s List, eBay, YouTube, the Internet Archive, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, another firms joined in a single letter opposing SOPA. They echo my warnings from way back when that SOPA creates the same problems for Americans online that Communist China creates for the Chinese online, denies due process, creates a permanent state of spying online, and undermines the fundamentals of the Internet in America.

The retort may be that four hundred companies came out for SOPA. No, they didn’t. The came out for a law to attack foreign infringers. They could have chosen to endorse SOPA and/or PROTECT IP. They chose not to. The same goes for the NGA who put out a similar call. I take them at their word.

Fortunately, there is another. SOPA gets a committee vote in the morning, but the OPEN Act is the way to go instead of SOPA. OPEN, the brainchild of California Republican Darrell Issa in the House, and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden in the Senate, turns SOPA on its head. Instead of having America play the ostrich, censoring our Internet to pretend foreign infringers will just go away, OPEN applies decades of experience to use the ITC to attack foreign “e-parasites” where they live.

When Al Qaeda attacked us, we didn’t respond by sealing the border and permanently ending air travel. No, we cut off American funding, and took the fight to them. OPEN Act takes the fight to the foreign infringers, the “pirates” themselves.

SOPA proponents will say that Issa’s criticisms have been addressed by a manager’s amendment to the bill. But Lamar Smith’s changes are not good enough. It still censors the Internet, threatening our jobs and our leadership worldwide online.

Rand Paul is on board. Darrell Issa. Eric Schmidt. Arianna Huffington. Left and right, libertarian and authoritarian, Democrat and Republican, nearly nobody actually likes this bill, except for a few on Capitol Hill and the lobbyists who have convinced them to back a few big businesses. But the bill is moving through the process despite this huge public outcry. That just means we have to get louder.

Kill SOPA. Pass the OPEN Act to keep the Internet open, and to keep our jobs and innovation flowing, if you want to protect Americans from foreign ‘pirates.’ This is an obvious call, not to give Eric Holder this censorship power. Keep notes, folks. Watch every Republican who votes for this. Remember their names, and check on their primary races. Make it count.

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COMMENTS

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  • indieinvirginnie

    Terrible laws have terrible consequences for years.

    One of the reasons for the terrible law under consideration is that the DMCA resulted in an incredible imbalance of power between content owners and tech companies (especially ISPs that provide “conduit” only services). Thieves use the pipes of the ISPs to conduct their illegal activities, and the only industry participants that are in a position to help enforce the law (ISPs) have nearly total at immunity pursuant to the DMCA.

    No wonder content owners are frustrated enough to support even more bad legislation.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    The DMCA at least attempted to balance the interests of everyone.

    SOPA tilts the balance firmly toward one side.

  • indieinvirginnie

    I would love to see some deep diving into these issue from a conservative and free-market (not always the same thing, unfortunately) perspective.

    I find the First Amendment issues silly, mostly. My ability to download an illegally-offerred Lady Gaga song (were I ever to be tempted to do such a thing) deserves no protection as “free speech.” Not does my ability to offer — simply for free upload to the world — a copy of someone else’s book.

    This (the advent of the internet) is not the first time industry practices — including technological advances — have dramatically altered the way business gets done, And it is not the first time that such changes have introduced costs or abuses on an industry that are hard to police.

    A well-defined system of strict liability — enterprise liability, to be more precise — is in my view the best way to allocate those costs in a way that ensures predictability and protection of property rights.

    Not some new regulatory regime. A thoughtful adaptation of existing notions of property law to account for new circumstances arising from new technology.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    So sorry if you’re getting butthurt because we’re trying to cut off the free ride.

  • indieinvirginnie

    Gee – it doesn’t take much to bring out your inner sophomore, does it?

    Content ownes would, I am sure, be surprised to hear that they have been the beneficiaries of a ‘free ride” in an era in which poachers feast freely on their stuff.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Copyright for most of our history was purely a civil matter.

    Now taxpayer subsidies are spent criminalizing it.

    I wish I could get the Justice department to be my gofer.

  • indieinvirginnie

    That is exactly what it should be — a civil matter. Clarifying copyright law to allocate the burdens of legal compliance in an efficient manner is entirely consistent with our history of statutory and common law traditions on the civil side. No need to criminalize.

    I like Issa, and I wish him all the luck in the world in running the corrupt Holder out of town on a rail. I would not trust the DOJ with any matter whatsoever (unless I happened to be a minority group that likes to intimidate voters at the polls or a gun control advocate who is willing to see a few folks die for the cause). It is rather amusing to watch the perennial liberals of the MPAA and RIAA get all “law and order” — and the Obama administration is more than willing to suck up to them, as long as they can do it out of one side of their mouths, while sucking up to Google and Yahoo with the other.

    I don’t want federal thugs as enforcers for either “side.” I want clear, predictable, workable law that allows content holders reasonable redress for high-tech viloations of property rights.

    OPEN may be okay as far as it goes (foreign sites and only those primarily engaged in piracy). But It is not the answer to the larger question on piracy.