PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, and SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, bills designed to crack down on piracy on the Internet, were sent back to the drawing boards recently following an outcry from Internet providers—including large cybercorporations—users, and other members of the public (see related story “An Unsettling Victory“). In a move that was designed to draw widespread attention, and did, Wikipedia and other popular sites blacked themselves out temporarily to muster users to protest the bills. Both houses of Congress heard the angry shrieks and promised to postpone votes and rework the legislation.
The bills purported to target foreign sites. But, said critics, they might have affected American sites if those sites or their users posted links to foreign sites carrying material judged to be pirated or otherwise improper (including material geared to sell “adulterated,” “misbranded” or “counterfeit” medicines to Americans). The bills, if passed, would not only have required removal of the prohibited material, but would have blocked access to any site that posted links to it. Critics warned that the effect would have been to put pressure on small as well as large websites to monitor all their content all the time or risk shutdown or other penalties.
In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee—whose chairman, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, was lead sponsor of the Senate bill, PIPA—96 Internet engineers warned that the legislation would not only threaten unoffending websites, but would throw the current domain name system into disarray. That concern was shared by the White House, which opposed the bills.
“All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict,” the engineers wrote, “but this bill will be particularly egregious in that regard because it causes entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under this bill. These problems will be enough to ensure that alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use, outside the control of U.S. service providers but easily used by American citizens. Errors and divergences will appear between these new services and the current global DNS, and contradictory addresses will confuse browsers and frustrate the people using them. These problems will be widespread and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.”
“There’s no question that people who sell fake Rolexes or tainted Viagra or movies they don’t own are bad actors,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has proposed alternative anti-piracy legislation, told the Washington Post. But, Wyden added, “to solve this problem by doing damage to the Internet, which has been a juggernaut for job growth and innovation and free speech, is a mistake.”
Another complaint about PIPA and SOPA, which were written with heavy input from the movie and music industries, is that they would have allowed actions against allegedly offending sites to be initiated by so-called “qualified plaintiffs,” including not only the U.S. Attorney General but holders of trademarks or copyrights. According to critics, they would have enabled corporations to move to shut websites down before the merits of their complaints had been determined.
Under Wyden’s legislation, copyright holders who believe their rights are being infringed by a particular website could file a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission. The ITC would investigate the site and issue a ruling about whether it was indeed violating the complainant’s rights.
