A colleague asked me today for a crash course on the "Stop Online Privacy Act" (SOPA). I sent him my feature at the O'Reilly Radar, where I wrote about how Congress is considering anti-piracy bills that could cripple Internet industries and harm digital innovation. The thing is, that post is about 6,000 words long and is now a month out of date. So here's the briefing I sent back.
First, you should know the major players in the House of Representatives: Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of House Judiciary Committee. His staffers had a major hand in drafting it. He supports it. So do Reps. Goodlatte and Berman. Rep. Mel Watts is the congressman whose remarks about not understanding helped to fuel headlines like "Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works" and "Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works," by Clay Johnson.
Who else supports SOPA? The RIAA, MPAA, big Hollywood and big labor. Ergo, there's bipartisan coalition of 39 co-sponsors that supports it in the House or Representatives. Why? As always, follow the money. Oh, and all of these companies support SOPA too.
Who's against SOPA? Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Jared Polis (D-CO) and most of the Internet industry. These four representatives introduced dozens of amendments during the markup of the SOPA that would have addressed the most damaging, controversial, vague or problematic aspects of the bill, post-manager's amendment. (There's a lot of those.) By raising them, they catalyzed two day's worth of debate during the markup, effectively filibustering SOPA's progress during the waning days of the legislative calendar. They essentially ran out the clock on the year at a time when the rest of the House was focused on other issues. See: payroll tax cut extension.
Rep. Michele Bachmann is the only GOP candidate I've heard talk about it, which is notable. I think there should have been a debate question about it and the Internet -- but those aren't up to me.
Key counterproposal: An "OPEN" bill from Rep. Issa and other opponents of SOPA. You can learn more about it keepthewebopen.com. There's a lot that's interesting about that site, including the text of both SOPA and OPEN enabled with public markup. The site hosted an embedded livestream of the markup hearings that drew hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Prospects for SOPA: mixed. On the one hand, it's looking likely that it will pass out of committee. Most of the proposed amendments were voted down 2-1 in HJC when the manager's amendment was marked up. Unless something changes, expect SOPA to pass through the committee and emerge largely unamended, particularly with respect to the provisions that relate to search engines and the use of the domain name system for enforcement, the most controversial aspects of the bill for the tech community.
On the other hand, there have been significant cybersecurity concerns raised about the bills because of what it would do to DNSSEC, including by DHS officials. The committee might take a classified briefing so that the government's own geeks from Sandia Labs, the Department of Homeland Security and other "Three Letter Agencies" could explain to the legislators) who somehow neglected to bring in any technical experts before the committee to testify) why SOPA won't work and why it's a terrible idea to try to DNS for enforcement. If that happens before markup, it could change the bill that heads to the House floor -- and House leadership might want to address security concerns before bringing it to a full vote.
There's going to be a month ahead before the companion bill to SOPA, the Protect IP Act, is brought to a vote on the Senate floor. During that time, U.S. senators will be hearing about how unpopular these bills are. It's unclear if public option will turn enough against them if the broadcast and cable TV networks (which are all quietly for SOPA) don't cover it. FOX News did do a spot, featuring the Cato Institute's Jim Harper, so that may be changing.
If Mythbuster Adam Savage decided to to a show about how SOPA could destroy the Internet as we know it -- as opposed to "just" writing about it on PopularMechanics.com, it also could change the dynamic.
Whether the broadcast networks choose to cover it or not will matter less next year than it would have even a decade ago. The Internet will drive awareness of these bills in 2012 in a way that simply wasn't possible before this moment in history. The reaction from tech companies and their leaders is in of itself news and it's much harder to miss the discussion around SOPA online now. Google, Facebook and Wikipedia still haven't changed their homepages to protest SOPA. While Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Jimmy Wales have expressed concerns about the bill, as written, Mark Zuckerberg has not written a "status update" himself like Brin about it yet himself. Those are 3 of the top 10 sites in the world and places that nearly 100 percent of online citizens hit daily. If Zuck or more Internet executives came out that publicly against SOPA, it would affect the debate in D.C.
Need to stay up to date on SOPA? The single most prolific blogger has been Mike Masnick at Techdirt, who has shifted much of his output to the issue over the past month. Masnick is ardently against the bill. I think Declan McCullagh at CNET and Gautham Nagesh at The Hill have produced some of the the best sourced coverage around right now and understand both the politics and the technology (a regrettably rare combination). If you want to keep up to date and can afford to pay to get the news earlier, Politico's tech policy team is all over it at Politico Pro (paid) and Morning Tech.
If you prefer your analysis free and in real-time, follow Julian Sanchez, who has been following SOPA closely for the Cato Institute, Nate Anderson at Ars Technica and Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing. The EFF and Center for Democracy and Technology have also been watching the progress and provisions of the bills on a daily basis, including livetweeting the hearings (@EFFLive).
What's the date of next markup? Unclear as of today. It might well be when the House comes back into session in 2012, in the third week of January. Expect Rep. @Darrell Issa to share it on Twitter. He's been breaking a lot of the news on SOPA there.
Other key date: Jan. 24. That's when the Protect IP Act (PIPA) is set to go before the Senate. Senator Reid has said he's going to bring it up on the first day the Senate is back in session. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who put a block on it, says he filibuster it. Key ratio, as with any bill there, is for/against in Senate. It will be interesting to see how other senators line up. That 60+ for or 40+ split is what to ask political analysts about -- I don't know that count as of today.
To learn more about where Senator Wyden stands on the Protect IP Act, watch my interview with him from this year's Web 2.0 Summit.
Follow Alexander Howard on Twitter: www.twitter.com/digiphile
Don Tapscott: 20 Big Ideas for 2012, Part Three
Be a HERO and Help STOP SOPA Now!! I'll tell you How! This Video that Must Be SHARED!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIuYgIvKsc
http://www.cbsyousuck.comB-) cool
http://onecandleinthedark.blogspot.com
STOP SOPA!!!
Ryan Ferreira
Also go to http://onecandleinthedark.blogspot.com and http://www.cbsyousuck.com for thousands of pages of evidence and links to the original source research
"A colleague asked me today for a crash course on the "Stop Online Privacy Act" (SOPA). "
It should be "Stop Online Piracy Act"
Maybe I missed something here. I AM tired.
SOPA is a way over the top measure. The only way to defeat piracy is to make it easier to buy things than it is to actually pirate them. Example: Steam, the PC gaming service.
Separating valuable copyrights from legal club copyrights can easily be achieved with a significant copyright tax and registration into a national data base and X $/yr/MB. Real value would remain with copyright protection and everything else would become public domain. Books, scientific articles, news articles etc. that haven't been in print or available for decades would become available for free and the world would be improved.
Time to highly tax copyrights and make the copyright holders (which are not the creators) pay their fare share.
Far from protecting the "little guy" from these big, nasty multinational beasties you folks are railing against, this would ensure that the ONLY copyright holders in America would be the giant conglomerates, who would surely pay to protect the libraries of already-celebrated content their empires are built on.
Meanwhile struggling artists would find their works passing into the public domain within a year of creation unless they could find a way to fork over the moolah. Think there'd be any young novelists (for example) who'd be willing to devote three or five years of their life to creating a work that will then have less than twelve months to find an audience? Which, by the way, frequently takes years for a difficult or challenging piece of writing--ask William S. Burroughs.
Ditto independent films, which are frequently years in the making, and have to present a reasonable prospect of a return to raise production money through investment.
Oh, and say goodbye to the Huffington Post under your proposal. The amount of money HuffPo would have to spend to protect its content from being freely ripped off would put it underwater faster than you can say Chapter 11--Aol's deep pockets or no.
I demand Internet wire communications CONTENT be REGULATED by the FCC as required by law!
http://www.curtisneeley.com/NameMedia/2011-2558/2558_Docket.htm
It's unconstitutional.
Here's a quote from the United States Constitution:
[Congress shall have the power] to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The Constitution only authorizes copyright law to be for the purpose of promoting progress. Benefits (if any) for copyright holders are only a means toward that.
It is clear that this bill, as well as PIPA, OPEN, and the DMCA, are for purposes other than that. For this reason, they are unconstitutional.