January 2012

[Commentary] The "content industry" establishment, led by the Motion Picture Association of America, has over the last 30 years been handed a series of statutory sledgehammers aimed at addressing copyright infringement. Now, with a pair of antipiracy bills pending in the House and Senate, the association appears to have drastically overreached. It looks as if the White House is seeking a compromise Stop Online Piracy Act/Protect Intellectual Property Act "follow the money" statute, which would avoid tinkering with the plumbing of the Internet or conscripting a broad group of online intermediaries into service as private police. Instead, this law would force payment processors to cut off services to sites that are found by a judicial officer to violate existing law. We've taken a similar step for gambling in the past, and this would be a far better way to proceed.

[Crawford is the (visiting) Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard's Kennedy School and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School]

Tens of millions of Americans, and millions more overseas, had their normal Internet routine disrupted Jan 18 as some of the Web's most popular sites, including Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist, staged protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The organizations that staged these protests are beginning to release hard numbers on the response, and they are staggering.

• The Wikimedia Foundation says it reached 162 million people with Wikipedia's 24-hour English-language protest of the antipiracy bills. Of those, more than 8 million readers in the United States took the opportunity to look up contact information for their members of Congress through the site. Presumably, that generated tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of calls to congressional offices.
• Google did not black out its entire site as Wikipedia did, but it still generated at least 13 million page views to its anti-SOPA page and got 7 million people to sign its petition.
• The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a liberal advocacy group, logged 200,000 signatures on its petition. The organization also says more than 30,000 Craigslist users called Congress through the PCCC's website.
• Opponents of SOPA and PIPA also staged in-person protests around the country; two of the largest were in New York City and San Francisco.

Alec Ross, the State Department’s senior advisor for innovation, pointed out that that anti-piracy legislation could restrict the rights of Internet users across the country – and put U.S. diplomats in a very awkward position.

“Any attempt to combat online piracy cannot have the unintended consequence of censoring legal online content,” Ross said, referring to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). He suggested that some measures in that bill could be inconsistent with the State Department’s Internet advocacy. The department’s global Internet freedom agenda was outlined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a speech nearly a year before the uprising in Tunisia. In the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions that followed the overthrow of Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali – some of which were catalyzed or sustained by online communication — it has become a central tenant of the department’s so-called 21st Century Statecraft.

As Clinton explained back in January 2010, lawmakers should ensure that citizens have the right to access the open Internet: "Governments should not prevent people from connecting to the Internet, to websites, or to each other. The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate." But this does not include the right to freely share copyrighted material online, she cautioned. "Those who use the Internet to … distribute stolen intellectual property cannot divorce their online actions from their real world identities. But these challenges must not become an excuse for governments to systematically violate the rights and privacy of those who use the Internet for peaceful political purposes." These principles could be could be compromised by the broadly written anti-piracy bills under consideration, opponents allege.

Rep. Tim Holden (D-PA) became the first Democrat to drop his support for the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) on Jan 18 after a massive Web protest of the bill. Rep Holden was one of the earliest backers of the controversial legislation and is the first Democrat in either chamber to reverse course after thousands of sites, including Google, encouraged users to contact lawmakers about opposing the legislation.