January 2012

Sen. Grassley pulls support for piracy bill

Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he no longer supports the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in its current form, dealing perhaps the largest blow to supporters of the controversial online piracy legislation to date.

“It’s critical we protect the intellectual property rights of our businesses and fight online infringement, but at the same time, we can’t do harm to the internet, the Constitution, or the ability of businesses to grow and innovate," Sen Grassley said. "Internet piracy is illegal, and we need to find a way that works for all sides. The current Protect IP Act needs more due diligence, analysis, and substantial changes. As it stands right now, I can’t support the bill moving forward next week.”

Grassley's statement indicates he is open to changes to address concerns the bill would lead to censorship and stifle innovation online. His office clarified that he is not withdrawing his formal sponsorship of the bill, which is heavily supported by the entertainment industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and organized labor.

Google Protest of Anti-Piracy Upends Lobbying

An online protest led by Google and Facebook against U.S. anti-piracy bills illustrates how Internet companies are changing legislative debate in Washington.

“It’s unprecedented,” Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard University professor of law and computer science who serves on the boards of bill opponents Electronic Frontier Foundation and Internet Society, said. “You could see some members of Congress saying there’s no percentage in it for me to stick out my neck on something like this.” “These organizations have reinvented a lot of the ways we live, how we connect, how we absorb media,” said Rogan Kersh, an associate dean at New York University’s Wagner School who conducts research on lobbying. “They’re now trying to reinvent how we carry out democratic politics.”

Google and Facebook are boosting spending and their Washington presence to cope with a growing list of issues, including online piracy as well as consumer privacy and antitrust. Google hired 19 outside lobbying firms last year, and Facebook has two new outside firms, Senate records show.

Hollywood fights Internet protests with... TV ad, billboard, radio spot

Creative America is fighting back. The group, which represents NBC Universal, Viacom, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, Disney, and others in the TV and movie business, launched a new TV commercial today supporting SOPA and PIPA. A national print and radio campaign will follow. But the highlight is a black animated banner ad that reads "What to do during an Internet blackout; it suggests reading books, listening to music, or watching a movie. The banner will be shown "on a huge billboard in New York's Times Square throughout the day on January 18th as an answer to those opponents of the bills who are blacking out their websites," writes Creative America.

SOPA: Obama could pay for decision in lost Hollywood cash

President Barack Obama regularly graces glitzy Hollywood fundraisers, studio execs have given big to his campaign, and big-name musicians and movie stars have stumped for him. But when it came time for Obama to have Hollywood’s back, his administration slighted the longtime Democratic force in favor of a powerful new ally — the tech industry.

On Jan 14, the White House put out a statement that read like it was trying to split the difference on two anti-piracy bills pushed by Hollywood. But by making clear that it wasn’t enamored with the bills, the White House helped slow down momentum, sparking grumbling among entertainment industry insiders. That Hollywood can be taken for granted on one of its top priorities reveals a seismic shift in Democratic politics that could have a lasting impact in party fundraising in 2012 and beyond. Leo Hindery, a major Democratic donor whose New York media private equity firm owns cable channels, said Obama might have reason to worry about his entertainment industry fundraising base.

SOPASTRIKE The Day After

[Commentary] Yesterday was absolutely one of those days that reminds me why I stay in public advocacy. I’m a democracy junkie. Yes, I admit it. The site of literally millions of people remembering that they are citizens and not just consumers gets me juiced. The good news is that by every possible metric, SOPAStrike was an enormous success. We absolutely scared the poop out of members of Congress and broke through the infamous “Washington bubble” that separates our elected officials from what is actually going on in the real world. As a result, we forced more than 20 Senators to come out publicly against PIPA/SOPA, including a number of co-sponsors withdrawing support. Fantastic!

SOPA and PIPA: Room for compromise?

House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) this week tapped his loyal lieutenant, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), to bring the warring factions together and salvage his Stop Online Piracy Act. But this saga might not have a Hollywood ending.

There are three big hurdles for the Senate and House bills that caused websites to go dark Jan 18 in protest.

On paper, it boils down to these issues:

  1. Should search engines like Google be included in the bill?
  2. Can content owners like Walt Disney ask a court to force Internet companies to stop doing business with suspected pirate sites?
  3. Who should enforce the law against international pirate sites — the Justice Department or the International Trade Commission?

After the success of the Internet blackout, however, not everyone is in a compromising frame of mind. Many lawmakers up for reelection in the fall would like to dodge the issue now that the voting masses have been riled up because it’s better to say on the campaign trail that you killed SOPA than it is to say you made it work.

Post-SOPA: the path forward for addressing piracy

[Commentary] Can we do anything meaningful about piracy without resorting to new private rights of action or to DNS blocking and search engine blackouts? We can. Though we certainly don't speak for anyone beyond ourselves, we believe that legislation drafted along the general lines sketched below could work—and could generate (some) agreement on an emotional issue.

  • Involve all stakeholders: By "involve all stakeholders," we don't mean what Washington usually means: put multiple behemoth corporations in a room to work out a deal. The public has a serious stake in Internet issues and needs meaningful participation.
  • Open drafting: We need to work on principles in public, then move towards legislation, not introduce maximalist legislation and make small concessions.
  • Hold real hearings: Piracy issues have been present for years, and legislative solutions will affect us for years. Let's hear from thoughtful people for a while and work to get it right.
  • Separate the key issues: Too often, the issues driving SOPA and PIPA are conflated. When backers want to scare people economically, they talk copyright infringement and use industry numbers. When they want to scare people on health and safety, they tout online pharmaceuticals that can turn your foot orange and counterfeit parts that could make your airplane crash in a fiery death spiral. These are not the same thing. Let's deal with them separately so that we accurately match penalties to threats.
  • Adversarial process: We'd like to see non-adversarial hearings reduced to an absolute minimum, especially in cases where the resulting penalties may be severe. Once judges have heard everyone and ruled after some deliberation, we have no problem with targeted action being taken against site operators who are truly violating the law.
  • Better definitions of "rogue" and "foreign"
  • Limited non-judicial remedies
  • Keep strong intermediary immunity
  • Follow the money: As for those enforcement measures, let's follow the money. Cutting off the funding to sites, by going after customer payments and ad network money, should force most bad actors to wither on the vine.
  • Escalation
  • International buy-in

Next battle over Net ramps up worldwide

While Congress is consumed by the online piracy battle, an arguably more important fight over the future of the Internet is quietly unfolding abroad.

In the coming months, countries will negotiate a treaty that will dictate how the Internet is managed. Currently, a collection of technical bodies govern the Web, deciding issues such as domain name management and technical protocols — and do so in a manner that, experts agree, is mostly devoid of politics. But if Russia, India and other countries have their way, that could all change. Models under discussion would potentially give governments more power over Web content and the pipes through which it flows. Critics fret that countries might try to use that new power to monetize Web traffic. The end result, American officials warn, would be an Internet more susceptible to censorship and less potent as a tool to foster democracy.

Department of Defense: Phones can’t outsmart troops

The video of four Marines appearing to urinate on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan raises troubling questions not only about military discipline and the laws of war but also about technology on the battlefield. Simply put: With camera-ready smartphones within reach of nearly every service member, is technology outpacing efforts by military commanders to harness it? “Technology used to give us Kodak moments, and now technology gives us stupidity at the speed of light,” said Doug Wilson, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. “The great challenge that this poses is that imagery is not in the hands of a few. It’s in the hands of everybody.”

China Expands Program Requiring Real-Name Registration Online

China will expand nationwide a trial program that requires users of the country’s wildly popular microblog services to disclose their identities to the government in order to post comments online, the government’s top Internet regulator said.

The official, Wang Chen, said at a news conference that registration trials in five major eastern Chinese cities would continue until wrinkles were worked out. But he said that eventually all 250 million users of microblogs, called weibos here, would have to register, beginning first with new users. Wang indicated that under the program, users could continue to use nicknames online, even though they would still be required to register their true identities.