Let me be clear. If you love your Internet, you must read this article. Congress is once again mucking around with our rights, and it ain’t good.
To put it simply, the U.S. House of Representatives is trying to pass SOPA, the
Stop Online Piracy Act(pdf). Now, we all know and accept that online piracy is bad. We all know and accept that it’s wrong to download music we haven’t paid for, and we all know it’s better to pay Netflix or iTunes for our movies than to steal them off Torrent sites.
Stealing is wrong and we accept that on faith. We all believe our artists and creative professionals (and the suits who follow them around with their hands out) deserve to get paid for their work. Heck, I make my living producing content. I like to be able to pay my bills as much as the next guy.
Unfortunately, our elected officials are once again allowing themselves to be led around by their collective noses by the lobbying organizations known as the RIAA and the MPAA. These lobbyists have no problem disrupting the Internet for their own gain, whether or not their efforts will damage our economy, cause jobs to be lost, or destroy one of America’s greatest assets.
It’s interesting when you think about it. The Internet was designed to route around nuclear warfare, but it’s almost defenseless against lawyers and lobbyists.
Here’s where SOPA goes wrong.
SOPA wants to give, well, pretty much anyone with a law degree the right to shut down Web sites and domains. SOPA has some nasty teeth. First,
according to the EFF, it allows individual companies to force payment processors (think PayPal or VISA) to stop paying any site that might be considered to be engaging in, enabling, or facilitating any form of copyright infringement.
Let’s first look at how this might impact you. What cloud-based services do you use? Gmail? Dropbox? Amazon’s music sharing service? What about eBay? What about Facebook? Or perhaps you simply host your corporate email at an Exchange hosting provider, like I do.
Let’s use that last one, as an example. My hosting provider, like most, offers a free SharePoint account along with their email hosting. Let’s say one of their other customers uploads something they shouldn’t. This new legislation would allow any other private company (including my hosting provider’s competitors) to demand that payment agencies cut off payments, effectively strangling cash flow and shutting the company down.
Let’s ignore the damage to my nice, kind, hard-working, highly responsive email hosting provider. Let’s just think about me for a moment. All of a sudden, my email service could be turned off, and anything I have stored there (yes, I have backups, but work with me here) would be gone.
My Internet Press Guild colleague
Sharon Fisher cites another example. She asks, what if you’re storing legitimate files on Dropbox, but someone else is sharing MP3s? A record label could go to a judge and ask him to block all money flow to Dropbox. Not only does Dropbox starve, you lose your stored files as well.
You can see how this works. There are chilling effects.
Let’s continue to use Dropbox as an example. Let’s say the law has been passed and the managers at Dropbox know they need to protect themselves. Do they now filter, explore, catalog, and otherwise violate your privacy actively to make sure you’re only sharing acceptable content?
Make no mistake about it, the SOPA legislation is running right up against our First Amendment rights. If you haven’t read your Bill of Rights recently, here’s what it says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Let’s deconstruct this oh-so-important Amendment and apply it to SOPA:
- Congress shall make no law: Congress is trying to make a law
- …abridging the freedom of speech: shutting down Web sites is certainly abridging free speech, especially if Web sites are shut down capriciously or without suitable defense
- …or of the press: if we feel we can’t write on certain topics, our freedom is curtailed
- …or the right of the people peaceably to assemble: we now use social networking as a primary means of assembly and there are some very chilling effects in this bill pertaining to social networks
- …to petition the Government for a redress of grievances: even here, there would be new restrictions, because we could be shut down based on any trumped up claim about “facilitating” infringement.
It’s not appropriate for me to tell you what to do about this bill, but I can tell you that, personally, it creeps me out and seems the essence of anti-American and anti-freedom.
more
thank you Richard
I’ve learned that Hollywood studio chiefs individually and as a group are drawing a line in the sand on the piracy issue with the Obama re-election campaign and refusing to give any more donations. The blowup came after President Obama on Saturday dashed moguls’ hopes that he would remain on the sidelines in the dispute over the U.S. House Of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act and the U.S. Senate’s Protect IP Act. In a posting on the White House web site, three of the Obama administration’s top officials for Internet and intellectual property matters said that they share many of the concerns that the Internet community has about the Hollywood-supported bills. The trio said that they “will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, and Special Assistant to the President Howard Schmidt tried to soften the blow to Hollywood by acknowledging that that online piracy is “a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response.” 
They added that they plan to host an online event “to get more input” on the matter. But Hollywood moguls told me they “didn’t know it was going to be as over the top as it was” and took this as a declaration of war. “We just feel very let down by the administration and Obama for not supporting us,” one studio chief explained to me. “At least let him remain neutral and not go against it until we can get the legislation right.
