[Infowarrior] - Sen. Ron Wyden explains opposition to pair of online piracy bills

[Richard Forno]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/sen-ron-wyden-explains-opposition-to-pair-of-online-piracy-bills/2012/01/17/gIQAG7sKHQ_print.html

Sen. Ron Wyden explains opposition to pair of online piracy bills

By Ezra Klein, Published: January 21 | Updated: Tuesday, January 17, 9:34 PM

For much of past year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has fought a one-man battle to keep the Senate versions of the aggressive online-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA from moving through on a unanimous vote. Last week, as a major online mobilization loomed against the legislation, I spoke with Wyden about why he opposes the bills, where the process stands and his alternative. A lightly edited transcript follows:

The Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act are well known at this point, but your involvement began earlier, with the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).

The COICA bill, which was the predecessor in the Senate to the Protect IP Act, came out in September. It was by Chairman Pat Leahy, just as Protect IP is. We’re up against one of the most powerful, savvy and active of the traditional Washington lobbies. Their bill has cleared the committee unanimously twice. We said from the beginning there’s a lot on the Senate calender, these are complicated issues, and when this  is front-and-center, there will be a tidal wave of opposition. And we’ve been proven right.

And how did you slow the bill?

I put a public hold on it. And I said from the beginning that first, there’s a problem here. There’s no question that people who sell fake Rolexes or tainted Viagra or movies they don’t own are bad actors. Second, there’s a straightforward solution, which is to cut off the money that gets people into piracy. But third, to solve this problem by doing damage to the Internet — which has been a juggernaut for job growth and innovation and free speech — is a mistake. So that was our argument: There’s a problem, there’s a remedy, but you don’t need a cluster bomb to solve it.

What makes PIPA and SOPA cluster bombs?

PIPA and SOPA, at their heart, are censorship bills and blacklisting bills, and they undermine much of the architecture of the Internet. I recognize that you don’t have discussions about the domain name system at every coffee shop in America. But it’s essentially the directory to the net. If you didn’t have a universal naming system — for my Senate site, wyden.senate.gov — it would just be gibberish. What the bills do is say, when you get a court order, you can’t use the domain-name system to resolve to the IP address.

Let’s say I run EzraTube.com. And someone has uploaded copyrighted content to my site. What happens?

When you type EzraTube.com into your browser, your browser is asking Comcast to ask other servers where that goes. These servers basically act as phonebooks. What the so-called “DNS remedy” in the bill  does is enable the attorney general to get a court order that tells Comcast, ‘When people want to find EzraTube.com, don’t send them there. Send them to a Department of Justice site instead.’ People who want to work around this would be able to. There are already third-party tools that use foreign servers or other domain-name servers outside of Comcast’s network. That’s a problem because, for the last 15 years, we’ve spent all this time building the DNS system into a secure standard. All of the important work on the net is built around the DNS system.

As I understand it, these bills would move the burden of policing content to the Web sites themselves. Right now, YouTube, if alerted to pirated content, needs to get it down. Under SOPA and PIPA, YouTube would be responsible for making sure it never goes up in the first place, and liable if they missed a video.

You are describing what I call the “turn Web sites into Web cops” provision. It has raised concern about what this is going to mean for innovation. That’s one reason venture capital folks are speaking out.

This also seems to favor the big rather than the small. YouTube has a legal department now, and Google’s resources are backing them. They could maybe survive this. A start-up competitor to YouTube couldn’t.

You got it. That site won’t be funded. And it gets to the question of capitalistic approaches. Two people in a garage will have to become two people in a garage with a fleet of lawyers upstairs. The other side of this is private right of action, which will allow the big players you’re talking about to swamp Web sites with lawsuits.

And where are these bills now?

Chairman Leahy and the leading advocates of these bills have essentially accepted that these bills — specifically PIPA, which has a vote scheduled for Jan. 24 — contain essential flaws. My view is that we don’t know the details of these changes, so I believe the bill remains a clear threat to job growth, innovation and speech. So the position I’m taking is that for the Senate to vote on PIPA next week is premature and could do great damage to the prospect of reaching a real and enduring agreement that would combat copyright infringement without doing permanent harm to the Internet. Our alternative bill, OPEN, hasn’t even had a hearing.

Tell me about your alternative.

The heart of this is to move this out of the narrow, legalistic confines of the judicial system, where you have scores of judges issuing different opinions, and moving it to where it belongs, which is the International Trade Commission. These rogue, foreign Web sites are engaged in international commerce and essentially perpetrating an unfair trade practice. The ITC is set up to deal with these goods, and they have great expertise on intellectual property.

And how does your bill handle things like the DNS systems and the search engines?

They’re not in there! We make it possible to cut off the money to those who infringe on the rights of copyright holders, but we don’t use the Internet as the focus of enforcement in the bill. What I hope people see is that while this bill applies to foreign rogue Web sites, the enforcement machinery in PIPA is American companies, American Web sites. We don’t use that. We use the narrowly defined trade laws and laser in on the bad actors.


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