January 2012

A Political Coming of Age for the Tech Industry

With a Web-wide protest on Jan 18 that includes a 24-hour shutdown of the English-language Wikipedia, the legislative battle over two Internet piracy bills has reached an extraordinary moment — a political coming of age for a relatively young and disorganized industry that has largely steered clear of lobbying and other political games in Washington.

The legislation has jolted technology leaders, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, who are not accustomed to having their free-wheeling online world come under attack. One response is Wednesday’s protest, which directs anyone visiting Google and many other Web sites to pages detailing the tech industry’s opposition to the bills. Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit organization, is going further than most sites by actually taking material offline — no doubt causing panic among countless students who have a paper due. It said the move was meant to spark greater public opposition to the bills, which could restrict its freedom to publish.

SOPA protest gets intended effect

The Internet community's rally cry against anti-piracy legislation is triggering its intended effect, though the final outcome remains far from settled.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill were flooded with calls Jan 18 in response to an online blackout by technology companies, including Wikipedia, Moveon.org, Reddit and thousands of other small sites protesting two related bills that would crack down on websites that use copyrighted materials and sell counterfeit goods. Some key lawmakers who've supported or co-sponsored the legislation are also backing off. Many of the sites that went dark Wednesday explained the legislation and entreated users to call their representatives by listing their phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

Rep Eshoo: More Than 10,000 Sites Join SOPA Protest

According to Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA), whose district is home to many Silicon Valley critics of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), more than 10,000 Web sites have joined the protest of the bill.

MPAA says Internet blackout ‘fails to enlist big sites’

The Motion Picture Association of America, a leading supporter of the House’s controversial online piracy legislation, tweeted that the coordinated online protest against the legislation failed “to enlist big sites.”

“Internet blackout against U.S. law fails to enlist big sites,” the tweet said. The tweet linked to a Reuters article reporting that although thousands of websites have gone dark to protest the legislation, some “big tech names including Facebook and Twitter declined to participate despite their opposition.” The MPAA tweet sought to draw a distinction between some of the smaller websites that are participating in the blackout, such as reddit, Mozilla and Raw Story, and the bigger sites that chose to forgo the blackout but protested in other ways. MPAA released a letter blasting the protests as an "abuse of power" aimed at turning Web users into “corporate pawns.”

When a petition isn't enough: SOPA protestors raise money to hire lobbyist firm

An enterprising group of techies who oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is taking a page from corporate America with a fundraising campaign to hire its own lobbyist firm.

With millions of dollars being thrown at members of Congress on behalf of corporations that want the power to shut down websites suspected of intellectual property infringement, an eight-person team calling itself "We The Lobby" is trying to give ordinary people a similar way of influencing votes in Congress. Since getting the site online on Jan 16, the group has raised more than $1,300 toward its goal of $10,000, which will be used to lobby against both SOPA and PIPA (the Protect IP Act). "99% of the time this type of lobby representation is only available to corporate interests. It's never really available to the common person," said We The Lobby's legal advisor Adam Dunn, who has a law degree and said he used to work for a law and lobbying firm in Washington, DC. The rest of the New York City-based We The Lobby team is mostly made up of Web developers, designers, and software engineers.

A history of IP violence: how SOPA's and PIPA's sponsors have waged war on the Internet

Three members of Congress have played an outsized role in the advancement of copyright protection legislation over the past few years: Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), and Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-MI).

And while the tech industry has certainly attempted to sway them with campaign support, the media industry has been even more generous in response to their efforts on behalf of big content. The two chief sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act, Reps Smith and John Conyers Jr., are long-time fixtures on the House Judiciary Committee. Smith is chairman of that committee, and Conyers (the committee's ranking Democrat) held the chairmanship from 2006 until Smith assumed it in 2011. Sen Leahy, the author of the "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011" (PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA), serves as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and is the second-most senior member of the Senate. Among them, the three have played a role in every piece of major intellectual property legislation for the past decade. While they've hardly been alone in their efforts on behalf of content creators, they've certainly been on point for them.

SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy

[Commentary] The purported economic harms of piracy offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from journalists and policymakers.

My own view is that this ought to be rather secondary to the policy discussion: SOPA and PIPA would be ineffective mechanisms for addressing the problem, and a terrible idea for many other reasons, even if the numbers were exactly right. No matter how bad last season's crops were, witch burnings are a poor policy response. Fortunately, legislators finally seem to be cottoning on to this: SOPA now appears to be on ice for the time being, and PIPA's own sponsors are having second thoughts about mucking with the Internet's Domain Name System.

That said, I remain a bit amazed that it's become an indisputable premise in Washington that there's an enormous piracy problem, that it's having a devastating impact on US content industries, and that some kind of aggressive new legislation is needed tout suite to stanch the bleeding. Despite the fact that the Government Accountability Office recently concluded that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the net effect of counterfeiting and piracy on the economy as a whole," our legislative class has somehow determined that—among all the dire challenges now facing the United States—this is an urgent priority. Obviously, there's quite a lot of copyrighted material circulating on the Internet without authorization, and other things equal, one would like to see less of it. But does the best available evidence show that this is inflicting such catastrophic economic harm—that it is depressing so much output, and destroying so many jobs—that Congress has no option but to Do Something immediately? Bearing the GAO's warning in mind, the data we do have doesn't remotely seem to justify the DEFCON One rhetoric that now appears to be obligatory on the Hill.

For Online Protests, Throwing Spaghetti Against the Internet

The World Wide Web is still learning how to stage protests online, with people and companies trying different tactics, throwing spaghetti against the Internet and trying to see what sticks. The reaction from the Web on Jan 18 to two separate bills in Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, seems to have pushed the online protesting experiment a little further.

Some of the reactions were borrowed from revolutions in the Middle East last year, when people changed their Twitter avatars to the color green to show support for the cause. This visual gesture seems to be borrowed from the physical badges people used to pin to a jacket or bag to protest wars and support causes in the past. Hunter Walk, an early employee at Google, acting on his own accord, set up a Web site called #BlackoutSOPA, which allowed people to easily change their Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus avatars, adding banners to the bottom of their photos that proclaim: “STOP SOPA.” Since the site was introduced earlier this month, more than 73,000 people had chosen to change their avatars. As a result, based on the number of followers these people have, more than 53 million people on Twitter and more than nine million Facebook users will potentially see these virtual protest badges.

DNC chief is backer of online piracy bill

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is among the most prominent supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Rep Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) is the highest-ranking Democrat among the bill's original sponsors in the House; the bill's supporters have been targeted by the growing grassroots backlash against the legislation from the technology community. Rep. John Larson (D-CT), a member of the House Democratic leadership, is also a co-sponsor. Wasserman Schultz's support of the bill highlights daylight between her and President Obama.

The Congresswoman recognizes that we need to have legislation that balances a strong, open, and free internet, while at the same time protecting Americans from companies that profit by stealing and repackaging other people’s work,” said Mara Sloan, Wasserman Schultz's press secretary. “She has heard from constituents both for and against the legislation and she feels strongly that we need to find a balanced compromise.”

Rep Issa pushes alternative anti-piracy bill

Capitalizing on the publicity surrounding an unprecedented Web protest of two controversial anti-piracy bills, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) introduced his alternative legislation, which is much friendlier to tech companies.

Issa's Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN) has eight Republican and 16 Democratic co-sponsors. Issa's alternative bill would empower the U.S. International Trade Commission, rather than the Justice Department, to go after the foreign infringing websites. The bill focuses only on a "follow the money" approach, requiring ad networks and payment processors to cut off business with the sites, instead of requiring other sites to delete links. The bill also does not include a private action for copyright holders to target sites pirating their material.

Benton

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