Why I Can’t Support the “Stop the Online Piracy Act”

      By Lauren Kelley, AlterNet

SOPA’s lead author, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas).  Texas’s main export is political excrement. 

Freelance film editor Marta Evry, who according to IMDd has worked on major series like House, Lie to Me, and The Pacific, has written an exhaustive blog post detailing why she cannot, as a Hollywood professional, support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.

As you may be aware, SOPA has pitted Hollywood executives against web giants and open-internet supporters who fear the legislation could destroy the internet as we know it. But this Hollywood type can’t get behind the bill, even though it was ostensibly drafted to protect professionals like her. Evry writes:

According to a report published by the AFL-CIO, online piracy costs content providers (mostly TV networks and movie studios) a lot of money. Around $20 billion annually.That, in turn, costs a staggering number of industry-related jobs – over 140,000 by some estimates.

As a freelance film editor, this scares the hell out of me.  If the networks and studios I work for don’t make money, sooner or later I’m out of a job. And if I’m out of a job long enough, I lose my union health benefits, my pension, the whole ball of wax.

However:

Even without SOPA/PIPA’s First Amendment implications (you can read some pretty good arguments here, here and here), the bills as currently proposed are horribly flawed documents devised by people who either don’t understand how the internet works, or worse, understand it all too well and are trying to game the system for unfair competitive advantage.

Evry goes on to detail how SOPA/PIPA are “built on a foundation of quicksand,” could interfere with foreign policy and cyber-security, and place all the burden for enforcement on U.S. businesses and websites. She concludes that “the divide over SOPA/PIPA isn’t political — it’s between those who understand the internet and those who don’t.”

The post is long and comprehensive — and contains some great suggestions on what you can do fight SOPA/PIPA — so I suggest you read the whole thing here.

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ADDENDUM

As SOPA/PIPA Becomes Toxic, Frantic Congress Test Runs Dropping DNS Blocking Provisions

from the scurry-scurry dept (techdirt.com)

Well, well, well. It looks like some in DC are starting to get the message that there is real concern with SOPA/PIPA. The latest is that the fact that SOPA/PIPA support is becoming “toxic” is starting to make the press. In response to that, plus significant pressure from those within the government who are concerned about online security issues… the folks behind both SOPA/PIPA are doing some trial running of finding out how people would respond if they just completely dropped the DNS/site blocking aspects from the two bills. The goal is to get the tech industry to “stop opposing” the bills (if not actually support them). Clearly, the opposition is having a pretty big impact, and we’re hearing that some of the “pressure” to “fix” these bills is coming from pretty high places. Separately, even with the House Oversight Committee hearings scheduled for next Wednesday, it sounds like Lamar Smith has decided he wants to restart the SOPA markup on the same day (perhaps with a new version of SOPA… sans DNS/site blocking).

Of course, while taking out DNS blocking fixes one problem with these bills, it still leaves in place a ton of other problems. Of course, supporters of the bill will falsely claim that taking out DNS/site blocking “fixes all the complaints!” That ignores that this is exactly what they said about the last “manager’s amendment” version as well. They figure if they just keep claiming that they responded to all the complaints, maybe people will believe them. But that’s ridiculous. The bills still have the super broad immunity provisions that will encourage all sorts of content/site takedowns to avoid liability. On top of that, many of the definitions in both bills remain ridiculously vague and would likely lead to overblocking in other ways — that is, things like “information location tools” having to block links to sites deemed rogue under the legislation would remain. Also, the anti-circumvention measures remain in the bill (and are not limited to just foreign sites), which is going to continue to create a huge headache for the State Department, which is funding the creation of many such circumvention tools for foreign regimes… even though offering them in the US would be a violation under the bill! On top of that, both bills still include the private right to action, which will lead to numerous unnecessary lawsuits.

The takeaway here: the growing momentum against these bills is having a big, big impact in DC, and it’s forced the bills’ main backers to go back to the well to see if they can find at least something to compromise on. Taking out the DNS stuff will piss off Hollywood… no doubt, but it hardly solves many of the bigger problems in the bill. Don’t be fooled. No one’s fixing the bill (hell, it’s not clear there’s anything that will fix this bill, because no one’s shown why this particular bill is needed!). They’re simply taking out one provision that is especially bad… while leaving in a ton of other stuff.

 

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