Editor’s Note: Don Henley revealed his statist colors in this article from last August. Here’s what the RIAA has to say. Here’s what the National Music Publishers’ Association has to say. Here’s another music industry article re: Protect IP. The bill will be back on the floor again in late January. Check out File Sharing Recognized as Official Religion in Sweden.
Citizen Times The Stop Online Piracy Act sets up a collision between two constitutional principles: copyright protection and free speech. Help stop it here.
Stop the Stop Online Piracy Bill! Support Free Speech!
Congress must favor free speech.
The House’s SOPA Act, and a similar but less sweeping Senate bill called the Protect IP Act, are aimed at foreign websites that infringe on U.S. copyrights. They differ in that while both target domain name system providers, financial companies and ad networks, SOPA targets companies that provide Internet connections as well.
Business interests, including the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are in support. Foes include such services as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL and LinkedIn. A letter signed by liberal Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Anna Eshoo, both California Democrats, and libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate from Texas, predicts that SOPA will invite “an explosion of innovation-killing lawsuits and litigation.”
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Legal experts can be found on both sides of the issue. Under SOPA, the attorney general may seek a court order against an offshore website that would, in turn, be served on Internet providers. If served, the provider must take “technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site.”
So what’s the big problem? Don’t copyright holders deserve protection? Yes, they do, though Congress in recent years been stetching the limits of “limited times” as set forth in the Constitution. But, there are a couple of big problems with SOPA. For one, the only way to determine which sites are flouting copyrights is to spy on individuals’ Internet traffic. For another, SOPA allows a website with thousands of pages to be banned if only one of its pages is in violation.
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Additionally, the requirement that providers redirect suspect domain names to government websites could interfere with the security of systems to protect confidential information, as in purchases or bank transactions.
Rep. Dan Lungren, a conservative Republican from California who heads the Homeland Security subcommittee on cybersecurity, fears that SOPA will interfere with attempts to upgrade security. SOPA has been in the hopper for two months, and the level of debate has heated steadily.
GoDaddy, a major registrar of website names, was targeted for a boycott over its support for SOPA. GoDaddy has backed off from SOPA but still supports Protect IP, and its critics are still unhappy. Even songwriters are speaking out, bucking the support for SOPA by the recording industry association. Leah Kauffman, of Philadelphia, has released a protest song titled “Firewall” and Britain’s Dan Bull has an anti-SOPA rap called “SOPA Cabana.”
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Opponents of SOPA face an uphill battle. Declan McCullagh of CNET notes that “SOPA’s backers include the Republican or Democratic heads of all the relevant House and Senate committees.” SOPA has 24 co-sponsors and Protect IP has 40, including Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C. When the House Judiciary Committee, led by SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, held hearings in November, no civil liberties groups were invited and the oppositon was represented only by Google, while three groups in support were invited.. Protect IP is scheduled for a Senate flloor vote Jan. 25. SOPA probably will clear the House Judiciary Committee this month, but there could be further committee hearings on the security aspects of the bill, McCullagh says. Congress needs to curb online piracy, but not at the expense of suppressing the vitality that has made the Internet a catalyst in movements ranging from Arab Spring to Occupy.
To use a military expression, the collateral damage from SOPA and Protect IP is too great.
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