[Infowarrior] - O'Reilly Guide to SOPA/PROTECTIP bills

[Richard Forno]

Congress considers anti-piracy bills that could cripple Internet industries

SOPA and PROTECT IP would harm innovation.

by Alex Howard  | @digiphile  | +Alex Howard | Comments: 4  | 22 November 2011

Sections

	• Opposition from the legal, technical and VC community
	• Fundamental cybersecurity concerns about PROTECT IP
	• More lawmakers come out against SOPA
	• A Congressional hearing stacked against the Internet
	• Wikileaks, DNS and the Internet commons
	• ICE and the Internet
	• SOPA and Internet freedom
	• Intermediary liability and ACTA
	• The sleeping Internet giant awakes

Imagine a world where YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter had never been created due to the cost of regulatory compliance. Imagine an Internet where any website where users can upload text, pictures or video is liable for copyrighted material uploaded to it. Imagine a world where the addresses to those websites could not be found using search engines like Google and Bing, even if you typed them in directly.

Imagine an Internet split into many sections, depending upon where you lived, where a user's request to visit another website was routed through an addressing system that could not be securely authenticated. Imagine a world where a government could require that a website hosting videos of a bloody revolution be taken down because it also hosted clips from a Hollywood movie.

Imagine that it's 2012, and much of that world has come to pass after President Obama has signed into law an anti-online piracy bill that Congress enacted in a rare show of bipartisan support. In an election year, after all, would Congress and the President risk being seen as "soft on cybercrime?"

Yes, the examples above represent worst-case scenarios, but unfortunately, they're grounded in reality. In a time when the American economy needs to catalyze innovation to compete in a global marketplace, members of the United States Congress have advanced legislation that could lead to precisely that landscape.

The Stop Online Piracy Act "is a bill that would eviscerate the predictable legal environment created by the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], subjecting online innovators to a new era of uncertainty and risk," said David Sohn, senior policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) in Washington, D.C., in a statement. "It would force pervasive scrutiny and surveillance of Internet users' online activities. It would chill the growth of social media and conscript every online platform into a new role as content police. And it would lay the groundwork for an increasingly balkanized Internet, directly undercutting U.S. foreign policy advocacy in support of a single, global, open network."

The names of the "Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) and "PROTECT IP Act" (S. 968) make it clear what they're meant to do: protect the intellectual property of content creators against online piracy. What they would do, if enacted and signed into law, is more contentious. SOPA is "really a Trojan horse that might be better named the Social Media Surveillance Act," said Leslie Harris, CEO of CDT, in a press conference. "Expect it to have a devastating effect on social media content and expression."

To ground the potential issue in familiar examples, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explained how SOPA could affect Etsy, Flickr and Vimeo. Don't use those sites? OK. Substitute eBay, Instagram and YouTube. Or the next generation of online innovation.

Let's be clear: online piracy and the theft of intellectual property are serious problems for the global media. Nor is piracy something that legislators, regulators, publishers or members of the media should condone. Given that context, this legislation has strong support from an industry coalition of content creators, including labor unions, artists guilds, movie studios and television networks.

Those pro-legislation constituencies do have their supporters. Andrew Keen wrote at TechCrunch that the "death of the Internet was exaggerated," disparaging the claims of the organizations, individuals and experts who have come out against the bills. Scott Cleland argued at Forbes, that this "anti-piracy legislation will become law," citing the scope of IP theft and the need to address it by some means.

Neither of these commentators, however, addressed the significant technical, legal and security concerns that persist around the provisions in SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act. The drafters of SOPA apply several enforcement mechanisms to combat online piracy. There's broad support for measures to restrict revenues that support sites that distribute copyrighted material or child pornography. The most controversial provision of the bills centers on the use of the domain name system as a means to prevent people from accessing sites hosting infringing content.

The Stop Online Privacy Act goes further than the Protect IP Act in a number of important ways, and it mirrors provisions in other acts. Nate Anderson wrote at Ars Technica that the House takes the Senate's bad Internet censorship bill and make it worse.

The CDT recommends a more focused "follow-the-money" approach "narrowly targeting clear bad actors and drying up their financial lifeblood, could reduce online infringement without risking so much damage to Internet openness, innovation, and security," said Sohn. "Fighting large-scale infringement is an important goal. But SOPA would do far too much collateral damage to innovation, online expression, and privacy. Congress needs to listen to the full range of stakeholders and seriously rethink how it should address the problem of online infringement."

Significant legal and technical concerns persist about SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act. CDT has a useful SOPA summary that clearly explains these issues. Sohn joined with Andrew McDiarmid to write an editorial in the Atlantic that says SOPA is a "dangerous bill that would threaten legitimate websites."

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http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/11/sopa-protectip.html


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