Unless you really are living under a rock, you may have noticed a several popular web sites and blogs have gone dark to protest the overreaching legislation known as SOPA (senate version) and Protect IP (house version). Other than the fact that you are being inconvenienced for one day, why should you care? To answer that, we should turn back the clock a little.
Back in 1998, then President Clinton signed a pair of bills called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (aka Micky Mouse Protection Act (MMPA)). These bills passed through Congress with ease; both enjoying relative bipartisanship. Both of these bills were examples of crony capitalism.
The MMPA extended the life of copyrights by 20 years and was retroactive. Not only did it delay works that were about to become part of the public domain, it also pulled works that were in the public domain back to being protected by copyrights. This law was a blatant end run around the limitations set forth by the Constitution. Due to the fact that SCOTUS has chosen to uphold the law, we now have never-ending copyrights (just buy a bunch on Congress representatives every 20 years).
The other bill, DMCA, was worse. It made it a crime to distribute tools that circumvent protection measures or even talk about to protection methods used to protect copyrighted works. It also gave copyright owners and right to demand web sites to take down pirated works. This law has had a chilling effect on the Internet and security research (really take a look). Heck, this law was even used to remove videos by the McCain-Palin campaign. The only good thing about this law was that it gave safe harbor protections to sites that might be unknowingly hosting infringing content.
The laws before Congress today (SOPA and Protect IP) are extensions to the worst aspects of DMCA. Not only does it expand the powers given to copyright holders, it also gives power of enforcement of copyrights to the government. It makes a crime of something that is now only a civil matter. It effectively removes the safe harbor provisions of the the DMCA. Additionally, it gives the government the ability to censor the Internet in any way that it sees fit by being vague about what really constitutes a violation.
With these laws, the government would be able to block a Tea Party, Occupy, and other protest sites. It would be able to quash any sites that dare reveal malfeasance by our elected officials (Wikileaks being an extreme example). As the abuses of the DMCA have shown, these concerns are indeed warranted. It is reasonable to believe that the government would abuse it as well.
This overreach by the government is not a partisan issue. It is both Democrats and Republicans that are supporting these laws. There are names of liberals and conservatives on those bills. It is a clear demonstration of how special interests have taken over Washington. Even if Washington chooses to back down, vigilance will continue to be necessary. It would not be of any surprise that they will try to slip through “lite” versions of these laws to get the foot in the door so to speak. We must not let them. One can be assured that this legislation will be back in another form and Washington will not be so blatant about what they are doing the next time.
Do what you can people. Vote them out of office. At the minimum, let them know that you oppose these laws.
Posted on January 18, 2012
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