Although Congress was back in
session for scarcely more than a day last week, private citizens across the
country managed to cause an uproar felt across Capitol Hill. The uproar took
the form of hundreds of thousands of phone calls to both Senators and
Representatives, urging them to oppose two draconian new bills that threaten
the free and unbridled flow of information on the internet.
On Wednesday last week, dozens
of prominent websites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Craigslist, were blacked
out in protest of two bills known in DC jargon as SOPA and PIPA. SOPA is the
House bill; PIPA is its Senate companion. These bills ostensibly will combat
internet piracy, and of course we also are told they will help us wage the
never ending "war on terror."
What these bills actually do
is force website owners to police the internet; create entry barriers to the
only relatively free and open medium of communication; and threaten to break
the technological structure of the internet itself. They also violate our 1st
Amendment right to freedom of speech and our 4th Amendment freedom from
unreasonable searches and seizures.
SOPA and PIPA have been
drafted not only without respect for the Constitution, but also without an
understanding of the how the internet works. These bills attack the very
system upon which the entire orderly organization of the web depends. Search
engines, internet service providers, advertising sites, and sites with
user-generated content such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter--all
magnificent creations of the market-- are directly threatened by these bills.
They will be held responsible if even a single of their millions of users
posts even one link to a website that a copyright holder claims is violating
a copyright.
Note that under the bills as
written, the Department of Justice or a copyright holder do not have to prove
that their copyright was violated-- they simply have to claim copyright
infringement and an entire site is shut down. The burden of these regulations
on the internet will be enormous, shifting resources away from productivity
and innovation and into monitoring and censoring. It turns internet companies
into involuntary tools for Big Brother government, further eroding our
Constitutional rights.
As is typical of so many bills
in Congress, SOPA and PIPA were not crafted to make life better for the
American people, but rather were written at the behest of big business trying
to enlist the federal government as its strong-arm. For example, the Motion
Picture Association of America spent more than $1.2 million so far lobbying
for their passage.
But the internet community is
fighting back effectively, not just with websites that went black but with
millions of users who expressed their solidarity. Congressional sponsors of
both bills have been jumping ship in response to the outrage. The House
Judiciary Committee canceled the SOPA hearing they were planning to hold last
Wednesday; the House leadership announced they have no intention of
considering this bill; and at the end of the week Senator Reid announced he
was postponing the vote until a "compromise" could be reached. The
American people are speaking, and with their continued grassroots efforts the
marketplace for free ideas and communication will prevail over government
controls and censorship.