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.
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