January 2012

Anti-piracy bills pose tough choice for vulnerable incumbents in House, Senate

House and Senate members staring down difficult reelection races less than one year away face a tough decision as opposition to two Internet anti-piracy bills continues to mount.

The two bills — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate — were championed by the entertainment industry as measures to prevent foreign websites from promoting copyright infringement with impunity. Both bills have roughly an even number of Republicans and Democrats signed on as co-sponsors, making it difficult for members to apply to this hot-button issue their usual calculus about where they want to position themselves on the ideological spectrum. In each of the two chambers, there are about a dozen members who are still on board with the bills but whose less-than-certain reelection prospects have raised the possibility that they could retreat from the legislation before further damage is done.

"Least restrictive means"? One way that SOPA could die in court

[Commentary] How might the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) hold up to a court challenge?

That means reviewing earlier efforts to regulate content on the Internet, among them the thankfully extinct Child Online Protection Act (COPA). Like SOPA, with its vague prescriptions against sites "dedicated to theft of US property" or that confirm "a high probability" of copyright infringement, the courts took a look at COPA and saw an overbroad legal mess that needed to be stopped, and fast. Here's how that decade-long legal debacle went, and why it is relevant to this controversy.

Why SOPA and PIPA Must Be Stopped

[Commentary] In the last 30 days, there has been a loud and clear backlash against two bills – SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). SOPA is the House version of the bill; PIPA is the Senate version of the bill. For starters, I must emphasize that I agree that online piracy is a real problem — and, as an author, I deal with it all of the time — and that it is important to look for appropriate solutions. Unfortunately, these bills, both in their substance and, significantly, the process by which they have moved along, fail this test. As such, they reveal a disturbing picture about the policy process in Washington, D.C. and threaten to create significant and unintended consequences if they are passed. And their passage was a real possibility before the tech and entrepreneurial communities spoke up.

We are now in an untenable situation. Both SOPA and PIPA are toxic. My view is that anyone who supports these bills either doesn’t understand what they are supporting or is simply no friend of innovation. And, if you are no friend of innovation, I can’t support you in any way, as innovation is the lifeblood of our economy, our country, and what I’ve dedicated my life to. So, let’s call on our Congressmen to stop this nonsense, hit reset, and, if this issue is one that they really want to address, do so in a balanced, thoughtful way. It’s time to bury both SOPA and PIPA, and try again.

[Feld is the founding partner of The Foundry Group]

Why I’m fighting SOPA: It’s hypocritical, onerous and dumb

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) may have been shelved by Congress, but the Senate’s PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) still looms and Jason Hoffman can’t stop wondering how we got to this place.

“It’s all just so dumb,” said Hoffman, CTO and founder of Joyent, a hosting provider that also offers IaaS and PaaS services. “The Senate bill is just as bad, if not worse than SOPA. These are both dumb bills and [are] a classic example of industry-specific lobbyists creating stupid laws.” Does that mean that the motion picture and recording industry has better lobbyists than SOPA opponents like Facebook, Twitter et al? Not really, it just shows that it’s easier to lobby when someone is supposedly a thief or a suspected terrorist, he said. “How do you lobby for freedom? That’s harder.” What really grates on Hoffman, is that the industries seeking protection — movie studios, record companies, publishing houses, broadcast networks — brought this mess on themselves. “Look at the list of companies supporting these bills. It could be a list of railroad companies a hundred years ago fighting the auto industry,” he said.

What does SOPA mean for us foreigners?

The Stop Online Piracy Act is an American piece of legislation, and as a general rule, American legislation has only limited influence outside US borders.

My fellow Europeans might, for example, marvel at the almost proud dysfunction that led to the creation of some American legislation, but ultimately it was irrelevant to us; a sideshow to be watched with bemusement. SOPA is a little different from most legislation, however, in that it has an explicit focus on websites that are, in some sense, "foreign." SOPA regulates the dealings between American service providers—most notably search engines, advertising networks, and payment processors (such as PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard)—and foreign sites. Search engines will have to remove listings of offending foreign sites; advertising networks will have to stop selling ads to offending sites; payment processors will have to stop processing payments from Americans for offending sites.

The delineation between foreign and domestic that SOPA makes is arbitrary and inaccurate. Canadians, whose IP address allocations are governed by the US-based ARIN, probably qualify as "domestic," and so may evade SOPA's regulations. So too might the Hong Kong-based MegaUpload, thanks to its dot-com domain name, and similarly the Switzerland-based RapidShare. The Pirate Bay might also escape SOPA's reach, thanks to a dot-org domain name. There's plenty of scope for interference with these sites' operations, through measures such as ICE takedowns. Just not necessarily using SOPA as the justification.

Sen Ron Wyden’s Letter to the Internet

[Commentary] Protect IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are a step towards a different kind of Internet. They are a step towards an Internet in which those with money and lawyers and access to power have a greater voice than those who don't.

They are a step towards an Internet in which online innovators need lawyers as much or more than they need good ideas. And they are a step towards a world in which Americans have less of a voice to argue for a free and open Internet around the world. Proponents of these bills say these arguments are overblown, but I say any step towards an Internet in which one person's voice counts more than another is a step in the wrong direction. These are bills that should give us pause. These are bills that should be studied and debated. Congress should consult experts and consider alternatives and make 100% sure that any step it takes to police the Internet doesn't change the Internet as we know it. This is why I put a hold on the Protect IP Act and its predecessor over a year ago and introduced a bipartisan alternative last month. The Senate, however, has scheduled a vote for Tuesday, January 24 at 2:15 PM to override my hold and move the Protect IP Act towards passage. This will be the deciding vote that determines whether PIPA and SOPA move through the Congress or are turned back for more sober discussion. We are up against a group of the biggest, most powerful, well-funded and well-organized interest groups in Washington. No one thought millions of Internet users would speak up or that those voices could overcome the power of these interests.

Today you showed that the Internet is not just a platform for ideas, commerce, and expression, but also for political action that will defend those principles. Your voices must continue to be heard.

By the Numbers: 103,785

A total of 103,785 people signed We the People petitions asking the Obama Administration to protect an open and innovative internet. A petition asking President Obama to veto the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) got 51,689 signatures, while 52,096 people signed the “Stop the E-PARSITE Act” petition.

The SOPA Blackout Created a Big Problem

[Commentary] "Going dark is cute, but, the only way SOPA dies is if the tech industry starts lobbying just as hard as the entertainment industry," Gizmodo's Mat Honan wrote. And Gawker Media's Joel Johnson tweeted, "Is it possible to appreciate protest blackouts and also think that they're mostly preaching to the choir?" Combined, the two tweets suggest support for anti-SOPA ideas, but a fear that the protests are basically useless because the target audience (Congress) won't be swayed by the blackouts. It's a sentiment that I've seen (re)tweeted in various guises over the last few days. In thinking about this critique, I recalled talking to a long-time organizer during the heat of the Occupy protests late last year. "Protests don't solve things," she told me. "Protests create problems that policymakers then have to solve." To be clear, by "create a problem," I mean to frame some set of facts and events in the world in such a way that they become a coherent bad, separate from the general messiness of the world. For web nerds, it's like dropping a shadow on text: suddenly, something is foregrounded. Much of that foregrounding isn't accomplished by the protests themselves, but by the media that spins out of such protests.

Web Sites Aim to Join Protests While Keeping Their Mojo

In joining the protests against antipiracy legislation by blacking out some content or popping up political messages, some commercial Web sites were putting advertising revenue at risk. But they had to worry about another possible consequence too: hurting their ranks in search results.

If search engines like Google scanned the sites and found pages missing or moved, it could take a while for them to re-establish their presence in search rankings. So the sites needed to use some tricks to protect their standings. Pierre Far, a Google employee who advises site owners, recently published a post on Google Plus offering tips on how to handle the situation.

AT&T Raises Fees On Smartphone Data, But Adds More Data To Monthly Plans

The price of a monthly wireless data is going up at AT&T, but the company is also throwing its customers a bone by increasing the ceiling of those plans.

The carrier’s three basic smartphone data plans will all increase by $5 a month starting on Jan 22 along with an increase in the amount of data that one can consume before kicking in the dreaded overage charges. New AT&T customers will have the choice of three data plans: 300MB of data for $20 a month, 3GB of data for $30 a month, and 5GB of data for $50 a month.

Benton

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