Before Solving a Problem, Make Sure You’ve Got the Right Problem

  By Tim O’Reilly

I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about #SOPA and #PIPA ,
and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups. The offending paragraph is as follows:

“Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.”

In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?

In my experience at O’Reilly, the losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content. Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O’Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway; meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of others are buying content from us, many of them in countries that we were never able to do business with when our products were not available in digital form.

History shows us, again and again, that frontiers are lawless places, but that as they get richer and more settled, they join in the rule of law. American publishing, now the largest publishing industry in the world, began with piracy.

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After Protest, Legislators Withdraw Support for SOPA, PIPA

By Andrew Albanese

As 2011 drew to a close, SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and its Senate counterpart, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) appeared headed toward passage in congress. Now, after what’s being called “the largest online protest in Internet history,” in which more than 115,000 websites participated, legislators are walking away from the controversial bills. According to the Web site Pro Publica, SOPA/PIPA supporters outnumbered opponents 80-31 before the Jan. 18 online protest. Within 24 hours of the protest, the tide turned, with 101 opponents vs. 65 supporters.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, January 18 was a “historic” day. “EFF alone helped users send over 1,000,000 emails to Congress,” EFF officials reported. “Web traffic briefly brought down the Senate website. 162 million people visited Wikipedia and eight million looked up their representatives’ phone numbers. Google received over seven million signatures on their petition.”

In all, at least seven Senators who had co-sponsored PIPA have now abandoned the bill, and 19 Senators total came out against it. And in light of recent events, Senate leader Harry Reid said he is postponing the cloture vote in the Senate that was set for next week. The opposition in Congress comes after the White House said it would not support the bills as currently written, and pledged to support an “open” Internet. And, in one of the few moments of agreement, all of the Republican candidates for president voiced strong opposition to SOPA when asked about it at last night’s debate in Charleston, SC.

The battle, of course, is far from over as PIPA still has over 30 co-sponsors in the senate, and SOPA could very well be amended and brought forward again.

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What Is SOPA Anyway? A Guide to Understanding the Online Piracy Bill

By AMY SCHATZ

It will undermine free speech and due process, says one side. It will protect America’s creative class from thieves, says the other. But what’s really in the Stop Online Piracy Act? A guide:

Q: What is the purpose of the bill?

A: There are actually two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act, known as SOPA, in the House and sister legislation called the Protect IP [Intellectual Property] Act, or PIPA, in the Senate. Both are designed to tackle the problem of foreign-based websites that sell pirated movies, music and other products.

Federal law enforcement has the authority to shut down U.S.-based websites that offer pirated content, but they can’t directly do the same to foreign sites like Pirate Bay. The Motion Picture Association of America, the legislation’s main backer, estimates 13% of American adults have watched illegal copies of movies or TV shows online, and it says the practice has cost media companies billions of dollars.

Q: How do the bills attempt to stop piracy?

A: The basic method is to stop U.S. companies from providing funding, advertising, links or other assistance to the foreign sites. The bills would give Justice Department prosecutors new powers to prevent pirate sites from getting U.S. visitors and funding.

Q: What are the new powers?

A: The Justice Department could seek a court order requiring U.S. Internet providers to block access to foreign pirate websites. Access could be blocked either by making it impossible for users to type a simple web address into an Internet browser to reach the site or by requiring search engines like Google to disable links to the sites.

The attorney general could also seek a court order requiring credit-card processors to stop processing payments to the sites and requiring advertising networks to stop placing ads on the sites or taking ads from the pirated websites for display elsewhere.

In addition, both bills would allow Hollywood studios and other content owners to take private legal action against websites that are alleged to be hosting pirated material.

The legislation would allow content owners to ask a court to require credit-card companies and advertising networks to stop payments to sites allegedly hosting pirated material.

Q: How does this harm free speech? A Wikipedia official said the legislation could allow for “censorship without due process.”

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White House, Congressional Leaders Come Out Against SOPA

By Andrew Albanese

In a statement, the White House this week said it would not support any bill that would “inhibit innovation,” for American business and vowed to protect “the openness of the Internet.” Responding to growing opposition by public advocacy groups, as well as online petitions, White House officials all but ruled out passage of SOPA, or its Senate counterpart, PIPA, as currently structured.

While acknowledging the risks of online piracy, the statement said any legislative efforts must be “narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity.” The statement also flatly rejected any proposed provisions that would “tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS),” such as those contained in SOPA.  The White House vowed to work on a bipartisan basis toward legislation “that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting, while vigorously defending an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation.”

Meanwhile, White House opposition isn’t the only thing standing in the way of SOPA. In a letter, Darrell Issa, (R-CA) reported on Friday that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) informed him that he will not bring SOPA to a floor vote until the bill’s flaws are addressed. In the Senate, however, Harry Reid is apparently still planning to move forward with the PROTECT IP bill.

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All Quiet on the Western Front: Media Reacts to SOPA Debate with Resounding Silence

By Jon Gingerich

The U.S. House of Representatives is debating legislation that could fundamentally change what types of content we’re allowed to access over the Internet, and the resulting outrage has sparked a heated ideological debate.  But for some reason the media isn’t talking about it.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA, as it’s widely called) was introduced in October by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). It’s a boldly ambitious plan to give copyright holders — and the courts, by proxy — better tools to fight the profligacy of online piracy originating from foreign websites.

In a nutshell: SOPA would give copyright holders the power to file lawsuits against sites that they believe are aiding in the pilfering of their goods, be it music, movies, TV shows, video games, or the distribution of tangible, counterfeit consumables. Judges could file injunctions against Internet Service Providers or individual websites, forcing them to block access to foreign sites deemed in violation of U.S. copyright law.

Included in the bill is an immunity provision for Internet providers that proactively remove “rogue” sites from their registries. In other words, SOPA attacks Internet piracy not by going after sites that create and supply nefarious content, but by censoring ISPs and search engines that enable their availability, knowingly or not. Specific targets include payment providers (like PayPal) that facilitate transactions with spurious sites, and ad services (like Google’s AdSense) that promote copyright infringing content in search results. The bill’s authors are aware that many of the Internet’s biggest bootleggers operate overseas. Because attorneys general can’t round up foreign DVD pirates, they’ll instead punish U.S. sites that facilitate a portion of their profits.

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What Is SOPA?

If you hadn’t heard of SOPA before, you probably have by now: Some of the internet’s most influential sites—Reddit and Wikipedia among them—are going dark to protest the much-maligned anti-piracy bill. But other than being a very bad thing, what is SOPA? And what will it mean for you if it passes?

SOPA is an anti-piracy bill working its way through Congress…

House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th of last year. Debate on H.R. 3261, as it’s formally known, has consisted of one hearing on November 16th and a “mark-up period” on December 15th, which was designed to make the bill more agreeable to both parties. Its counterpart in the Senate is the Protect IP Act (S. 968). Also known by its cuter-but-still-deadly name: PIPA. There will likely be a vote on PIPA next Wednesday; SOPA discussions had been placed on hold but will resume in February of this year.

…that would grant content creators extraordinary power over the internet…

The beating heart of SOPA is the ability of intellectual property owners (read: movie studios and record labels) to effectively pull the plug on foreign sites against whom they have a copyright claim. If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is torrenting a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site’s ISP prevent people from even going there.

…which would go almost comedically unchecked…

Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off.

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