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SOPA and PIPA Are Bad

Update: KCCI just posted a great news story of me, countering arguments by PIPA/SOPA co-sponsor Sen. Charles Grassley. You can watch it here.

SOPA and PIPA Are Bad
There seems to be some confusion on this issue, so let me make it clear. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) are bad. They are bad for you, bad for me, bad for anyone with a blog, a Facebook profile, or any other type of website. SOPA and PIPA are bad for anyone who uses the Internet.

Isn’t Stopping Infringers a Good Thing?

Yes, and ever since the Copyright Act of 1790, United States law has provided copyright owners with the tools they need to stop infringers. Not only that, but the entertainment industry has gotten many additional laws passed. These new laws not only increased the length of copyright protection from 28 years to 150 years or more, but addressed everything from downloading, to file sharing, to circumventing digital rights management (DRM) software. Needless to say, even without SOPA and PIPA, the entertainment industry has more than enough recent laws at its disposal to stop copyright infringers.

So What Are SOPA and PIPA All About?

What Congress and the entertainment industry want you to believe is that SOPA and PIPA are about stopping online piracy. They argue that it is still too difficult to target infringers who have moved their operations overseas. If passed, SOPA would allow the U.S. Attorney General to target the companies providing Internet service to alleged infringers. It would also force search engines and websites to remove links to allegedly infringing websites and allow seizure of advertising and other revenue coming from the United States. The reality is that SOPA would not work. It would do nothing to actually prevent people from accessing the alleged infringing overseas websites. Even if the domain name was filtered, people could just type in the Internet Protocol (IP) Address directly and access the website. Although SOPA will not stop people from accessing overseas websites, SOPA will stifle innovation and generate thousands of new lawsuits. SOPA will take money taxpayers and small companies are currently spending on innovation and redirect that money into the pockets of attorneys, hired by our government and the entertainment industries to stifle that innovation.

Why Have I Not Heard of This?
You might think that a bill that threatens to affect what you do every day (assuming you use the Internet every day) and has nearly 1,000 registered lobbyists working on it, would make the news. Unfortunately, most major news providers, including Fox News and NBC-Universal, are strong supporters of SOPA, and have chosen to keep both SOPA and PIPA out of the limelight while Congress attempts to pass the bills into federal law.

Why Is Congress Supporting SOPA/PIPA?
Individual members of Congress will give you different reasons why they are supporting this innovation-killing legislation. There is no denying, however, that the entertainment industry has spent millions of dollars pushing SOPA/PIPA. Looking at just two of the bills’ sponsors, Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), they have collectively received nearly two million dollars in campaign contributions from the TV/Movies/Music industry.

What Are the Dangers of SOPA/PIPA?
The danger is that big companies will use SOPA/PIPA to put small companies and websites out of business. Less competition would be great news to large media concerns that have been steadily losing market share to the Internet. While a bigger, broader and more diversified Internet is good for you and me, it is bad for large entertainment companies that refuse to innovate as fast as their smaller competitors.

SOPA/PIPA would also make it easier for large entertainment companies to use automated programs to search the Internet and send erroneous copyright take-down notices. According to Erik Martin, the general manger of the popular Reddit website, “human beings aren’t even looking at this – the potential for abuse is huge.” SOPA/PIPA threatens to place law-abiding small companies in the position of having to redirect innovation resources to pay an attorney to respond to a baseless infringement take-down notice.

Another danger of SOPA/PIPA goes to the heart of Internet security. The Internet is based upon a system of numerical addresses, called Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) takes a domain name, like Google, and translates it into the associated website’s unique IP address, such as 209.85.145.105. While typing either Google.com or 209.85.145.105 into your address bar will get you to the same place, domain names, such as Google are much easier to remember. By allowing the government and the entertainment industry to filter the Internet, SOPA/PIPA risks opening up the secure DNS system, as well as even more secure systems, such as DNSSEC, to exploitation by cybercriminals. Not only that, but the SOPA/PIPA domain name blocking provisions will do little to cripple offshore infringing websites. Simply typing in the IP address, instead of the domain name, into your address bar makes the SOPA/PIPA domain name blocking provisions worthless.

What Can I Do?
Contact your congressional representatives today. There are already many federal laws in place to prevent online infringement. While SOPA and PIPA will do little to curb future online infringement, they will, if passed into law, stifle innovation, censor the Internet, and make the Internet less secure. On January 18, 2012, websites like Google, Reddit and Wikipedia gave you a small taste of what SOPA and PIPA are all about. If you prefer that SOPA and PIPA not censor thousands and thousands more websites, contact your Representatives and tell them to vote “No” on SOPA, and contact your Senators and tell them to vote “No” on final passage of PIPA. Tell them you will remember their votes on Election Day.

Brett Trout

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