Media industry groups have been trying to push through
legislation for years that stops online piracy for years.
Whether you're someone who uses file sharing or streaming
sites or not, most recognize that it is illegal and these
industry people do have a legal leg to stand on in looking
for common sense ways for copyright owners to force sites
to take down their content.
But that's only part of the picture with the Stop Online
Piracy Act (SOPA). Hidden behind that relatively benign
name, and some rules that are fair, are rules that go far
and beyond past what a copyright holder needs to stop file
sharing of the material they own.
A list of major internet titans penned an open letter to
Congress the other day, asking them to not pass SOPA. Some
noteworthy names include Google founder Sergey Brin,
Yahoo's David Filo and Jerry Yang, eBay's Pierre Omidyar,
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, Twitter's Jack Dorsey and
craigslist's Craig Newmark. Last month several major
internet companies, among them Google, Facebook, eBay,
Mozilla (who makes FireFox), Yahoo & AOL, also came
together to warn lawmakers that SOPA, saying it "poses a
serious risk to our industry's continued track record of
innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation's
cybersecurity."
Here is the crux of the latest open letter:
We've all had the good fortune to found Internet
companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that
promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of
content and free _expression_ online.
However we're worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the
Stop Online Piracy Act--which started out as
well-meaning efforts to control piracy online--will
undermine that framework.
These two pieces of legislation threaten to:
- Require web services, like the ones we
helped found, to monitor what users link to, or
upload. This would have a chilling effect on
innovation;
- Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
- Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web
using techniques similar to those used by China,
Malaysia and Iran; and
- Undermine security online by changing
the basic structure of the Internet.
We urge Congress to think hard before changing the
regulation that underpins the Internet. Let's not deny the
next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same
opportunities that we all had.
Defenders of the legislation claim that it will only be
used against obvious offenders, but the wording of the law
is so vague, that even Facebook is afraid that it might be
a target and it could be used to put people in jail for up
to three years for doing things like singing their
favorite songs on YouTube. The law can punish, potentially
even shutting them down, websites that display links to
illegal copyrighted content. This poses such a threat to
their business that Yahoo has dropped their membership
with the US Chamber of Commerce, and for good reason. If a
search on Yahoo, Google or Bing comes up with illegal
content, in theory Yahoo, Google and Bing could be shut
down or fined.
The same could potentially happen on Facebook, if one of
your friends posts a link to illegal content, or YouTube
if someone posts the video to a Metallica song. It's
impossible for sites like YouTube, Facebook and other
sites that host user generated content to look at even a
fraction of their content to take down potentially
copyrighted material, yet this is precisely what this law
wants to require them to do.
And if you think this is an overstatement that these
companies use the legal system to do outlandish things to
file sharers, ask the family who was sued by the Recording
industry for putting a video of their baby on YouTube,
because there was a copyrighted song playing on the radio
in the background, and has sued families into bankruptcy
for their tweener kid downloading a tracks that would have
cost a couple bucks on iTunes. These people have
illustrated time and time again that they have no sense of
fairness or proportion, and cannot be trusted with legal
tools like this law would give them.
Passing this legislation would make the internet less
secure, stifle innovation in the United States (leaving
other nations to lead, in a sector of the world economy
where we are usually at the forefront) and do you really
want to give these companies a tool that they could
literally use to put teenagers singing copyrighted songs
on YouTube in jail?
It's beyond me why any Congressperson would even consider
this. We should all be thanking Democratic Senator from
Oregon Ron Wyden for placing a hold on the bill, giving
people the chance to organize and tell their
representatives that voting for this would be
unacceptable.
Solomon Kleinsmith is a former nonprofit worker,
serial social entrepreneur and strident centrist
independent blogger from Omaha, Nebraska. His website, Rise
of the Center, is the fastest growing blog
targeting centrist independents and moderates.
