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Draconian new anti-piracy laws being pushed through both the Senate and the House of Representatives are about more than just an academic debate over different legislative methods for fighting copyright infringement. They make it clear that media and content companies are fundamentally opposed to the way the Internet works. These bills are promoted by media and entertainment conglomerates as a way to fight what they see as massive content theft, but to combat that evil, the companies are effectively trying to get Congress to take over the Internet—and trample on important principles such as freedom of speech.
As the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act—and its cousin, the E-Parasite Act—have worked their way through the Senate and the House, a loose coalition of technology companies and open-Internet advocates have come together to oppose the legislation—including such companies as Google (GOOG), Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo! (YHOO), some of whom appeared before a committee hearing on Wednesday to discuss the proposed laws, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and even a group of civil rights agencies. Mozilla, the open-source browser project, changed its home page to lobby against the bills, and a number of civil liberty and open-Internet advocates made Wednesday what they called “American Censorship Day” and promoted a video about the evils of the proposed legislation (embedded below).
Google’s copyright counsel, Katherine Oyama, testified before the committee about the dangers of the new laws, which she said would fundamentally conflict with the principle of “safe harbor” enshrined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and allow—in fact, require—private companies such as Internet providers to “disappear” sites from the Internet after even an allegation of infringement. In her prepared testimony, Oyama said that while Google opposes piracy, it could not support the bill because:
“[I]t would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action, and technology mandates that could require monitoring of web sites and social media. Moreover, we are concerned that the bill sets a precedent in favor of Internet censorship.”
Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN reporter and co-founder of the Global Voices project at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote a passionate opinion piece for the New York Times about the dangers of what she said was a U.S. equivalent to China’s repressive Great Firewall laws, which severely restrict what Internet users can search for and which websites they can visit. In some ways, MacKinnon said, the U.S. version would be even worse, because it would allow private companies—copyright holders and payment companies such as PayPal (EBAY) and Visa (V)—to cut off websites on even a suspicion of copyright infringement, without the need to prove any such charges in court. Said MacKinnon:
“The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. … the intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.”
The issues behind bills like SOPA and E-Parasite are much bigger than just a tussle between tech companies and content creators over some proposed legislation. As Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures says in a blog post, what these bills do is expose a fundamental disconnect between proponents of an open Internet and companies and legislators who would rather create their own kind of Internet: a version of the Web that’s less chaotic, more respectful, and most importantly, a lot easier to control. As Burnham notes, that kind of Internet would make things a lot easier for content producers and entertainment conglomerates, but it would remove or imperil a lot of the things that make the Internet so valuable:
