0:00:00.334,0:00:03.403 Well today has been dubbed "American Censorship Day". 0:00:03.403,0:00:07.084 An incredible amount of opposition is mounted towards legislation working its way 0:00:07.084,0:00:10.908 through both the House and the Senate to combat copyright infringement on the web. 0:00:10.908,0:00:14.117 Now we've spoken about the PROTECT-IP Act many times on this show, 0:00:14.117,0:00:18.252 but today, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on their version of the bill, 0:00:18.252,0:00:24.110 known as SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act". The PROTECT-IP Act would allow the attorney general 0:00:24.110,0:00:28.444 to create a blacklist of websites that they see as engaging in "infringing activities" 0:00:28.444,0:00:33.403 to be blocked by ISP providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, 0:00:33.403,0:00:37.304 all without a court hearing or a trial. But SOPA goes even further. 0:00:37.304,0:00:40.209 And numerous groups have come out against both pieces of legislation, 0:00:40.209,0:00:44.698 from civil liberties and free speech groups like the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 0:00:44.698,0:00:49.065 various think tanks, a bipartisan group of lawmakers including Ron Paul, 0:00:49.065,0:00:53.220 more than 100 legal scholars, and even tech giants. 0:00:53.220,0:00:56.773 Take a look at this full-page ad taken out in the New York Times today. 0:00:56.773,0:01:03.507 It was taken out by AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga. 0:01:04.092,0:01:07.478 So much opposition, might Congress actually listen? 0:01:07.478,0:01:11.726 Here to discuss it with me is Alexander Howard, the Government 2.0 Washington correspondent 0:01:11.726,0:01:14.699 for O'Reilly Media. Alexander, thanks so much for being here tonight. 0:01:14.699,0:01:16.150 -Nice to be here. 0:01:16.150,0:01:20.948 -OK like I said, our viewers are very familiar with the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), 0:01:20.948,0:01:24.151 but let's talk about what the differences are between PIPA and SOPA, 0:01:24.151,0:01:26.216 why this is one considered to be so much worse. 0:01:26.216,0:01:30.658 -Well I think one of the ways that people tend to look specifically at is this Private Right of Action 0:01:30.658,0:01:34.747 and you referred to that a little bit, which is to say that someone who as the ownership 0:01:34.747,0:01:39.633 to a given piece of content and feels it is infringing could then go right to the Department of Justice 0:01:39.633,0:01:44.346 and do that in a way that is not necessarily public and then make a complaint against it. 0:01:44.346,0:01:48.730 And then it would give the Department of Justice certain powers to then take that site offline. 0:01:48.730,0:01:52.627 And you talked about a number of them: the idea that you could take it out of search results, 0:01:52.627,0:01:58.708 the way you could constrain it financially, and then, potentially most controversial, which is 0:01:58.708,0:02:03.182 using the Domain Name System to make it so that when people search for the domain of the site, 0:02:03.182,0:02:04.681 they simply couldn't find it. 0:02:04.681,0:02:10.148 -OK, but how about the fact too, that some of these companies, now, if something is posted online 0:02:10.148,0:02:14.002 that might be infringing on copyright, as soon as they're notified, they just take it down. 0:02:14.002,0:02:17.300 But, won't they be held responsible now that they're gonna have to start blocking it, 0:02:17.300,0:02:22.762 censoring it from the very beginning, they'll face legal repercussions if it ever gets up there? 0:02:22.762,0:02:28.415 -Right, I mean the existing infrastructure for this is the DMCA, you do a DMCA takedown. 0:02:28.415,0:02:32.271 If you are a company, you see something of yours up on YouTube for instance, and say you have 0:02:32.271,0:02:37.006 ownership to that, the individual piece of content gets taken down. And that's seen 0:02:37.006,0:02:40.494 some amount of abuse, but it's been a workable system that basically says: 0:02:40.494,0:02:44.708 If you see infringing content on a given site, a given piece, you take that off. 0:02:44.708,0:02:51.066 What this bill has been introduced around is this idea of rogue websites that are outside of the US. 0:02:51.066,0:02:56.014 And Congress, with the urging of a lot of people who have sponsored the bill 0:02:56.014,0:03:02.917 and the people you saw testify today, are interested in finding ways to prevent these rogue websites 0:03:02.917,0:03:07.788 beyond US jurisdiction from being able to host, or link to, pirated content. 0:03:07.788,0:03:11.358 And there are only so many means you can do that. 0:03:11.358,0:03:15.903 The one that I think there's broad consensus around is following the money. 0:03:15.903,0:03:19.633 You know changing the way that you could fund these sites though advertising 0:03:19.633,0:03:23.291 or through payment mechanisms, the same thing in fact that has been used to strangle WikiLeaks. 0:03:23.291,0:03:26.507 But one that's quite controversial in the Internet community is this idea of using 0:03:26.507,0:03:28.275 the Domain Name System (DNS) to do that. 0:03:28.275,0:03:32.179 -Alright, let's in fact talk about the hearing today and who was there. I already mentioned 0:03:32.179,0:03:38.118 the long list of the tech giants, organizations out there, members of Congress 0:03:38.118,0:03:40.867 that are all opposed to the legislation. But the people who are backing it, you have 0:03:40.867,0:03:43.685 the Chamber of Commerce, you have the Motion Picture Association, 0:03:43.685,0:03:49.436 you have a lot of the entertainment industry. How come they, or how come the opposition 0:03:49.436,0:03:53.477 wasn't allowed to speak or voice their concerns today at this hearing? 0:03:53.477,0:03:58.862 -You would have to ask Representative Smith and the heads of the Judicial Council. 0:03:58.862,0:04:00.820 -But did they give no explanation? 0:04:00.820,0:04:07.881 -To my understanding, the Consumer Electronics Association, which is the biggest of its kind, 0:04:07.881,0:04:13.864 asked to testify and did not have the opportunity. If you took a picture of that table of people 0:04:13.864,0:04:18.392 that was there, the only one, from the companies you referenced, the biggest Internet companies 0:04:18.392,0:04:23.430 in the world, was Google. And that representative had a pretty tough time today, 0:04:23.430,0:04:26.823 a lot of tough questions from the Congressmen. 0:04:26.823,0:04:30.320 You didn't see constituencies from the venture capital community, you didn't see 0:04:30.320,0:04:35.809 constituencies from public advocates, from civil right organizations, human rights organizations. 0:04:35.809,0:04:41.217 And, notably, you didn't see anyone from the engineering side. There was actually a specific point, 0:04:41.217,0:04:47.087 where one of the Congressmen raised this issue of whether this bill would be a problem for cyber security. 0:04:47.087,0:04:50.524 And as you know this is a huge issue in Washington, cyber crime has been growing, 0:04:50.524,0:04:56.402 it's a really important issue, [...] on the national stage a strategic bid. 0:04:56.402,0:05:03.554 So when someone brought up this idea that a past council of DHS, Lamar, I'm sorry... 0:05:03.554,0:05:09.313 Lamar Smith was reminded about this, his name was Mr. Baker, that this Domain Name System, 0:05:09.313,0:05:13.603 security was an issue, something that engineers had been working on for a long time. 0:05:13.603,0:05:16.716 -You'd think that this was something that members of Congress would care about as well... 0:05:16.716,0:05:20.487 -They do. And when it was raised, it came up "We should know about that" and they asked 0:05:20.487,0:05:24.904 the witnesses about it. And this is called DNSSEC and it is basically trying to 0:05:24.904,0:05:30.118 build in more security in the Domain Name System. Because without it, there are some ways that 0:05:30.118,0:05:35.502 your traffic can be spoofed, which can be a significant issue if you're in parts of the world 0:05:35.502,0:05:39.365 where if your traffic is intercepted, it could be dangerous to you. 0:05:39.365,0:05:45.045 And essentially, something unusual happened: A group of Internet engineers wrote a letter 0:05:45.045,0:05:49.198 to Congress saying, "If you do this, it's gonna break what we've been building." 0:05:49.198,0:05:53.019 Now I don't know if you've hung out with many engineers, they don't usually like to 0:05:53.019,0:05:57.285 insert themselves in politics. But they have. So did a number of venture capitalists, 0:05:57.285,0:06:02.629 including Fred Wilson, including Brad Burnham and Feld, you know these don't get involved usually. 0:06:02.629,0:06:07.000 -So all about it, it seems rather crazy that the Congress wouldn't at least allow them 0:06:07.000,0:06:12.659 to come in and have their piece when they are going through this type of hearing process. 0:06:12.659,0:06:15.881 And so what do you think the chances are that some of this might actually go through, 0:06:15.881,0:06:18.701 either the Senate version or the House version? 0:06:18.701,0:06:25.018 -Well it depends who you talk to. If you talk to Darrell Issa, who is the Chairman on 0:06:25.018,0:06:28.987 Government Oversight, he told The Hill today that he doesn't think it's gonna get very far. 0:06:28.987,0:06:34.145 He thinks that the regulatory burden here is gonna actually be a significant oppositon. 0:06:34.145,0:06:38.380 The security is one important thing. People actually bark (?) at that, right? 0:06:38.380,0:06:41.379 -But do you think, really quickly because we're running out of time, but do you think that 0:06:41.379,0:06:44.625 this also equates us in terms of censorship, we've heard a lot of people say: 0:06:44.625,0:06:47.836 Well, we point fingers at China all the time and here our government would be setting 0:06:47.836,0:06:51.021 a very dangerous precedent, you know for what it looks like around the world. 0:06:51.021,0:06:54.178 -People perked up when the MPAA talked about that a little bit. 0:06:54.178,0:06:58.389 There is a very important op-ed written by Rebecca MacKinnon in the New York TImes today 0:06:58.389,0:07:02.656 and she entitled it "The Great Firewall of America", referring to China's censorship mechanism. 0:07:02.656,0:07:08.124 And this particular principle, this idea that a site should be held liable or not 0:07:08.124,0:07:12.266 for infringing content that's put on to it - The way we've made the Internet over the past 0:07:12.266,0:07:15.597 20 years has protected sites from doing it, it's really what has enabled the Internet 0:07:15.597,0:07:20.765 to grow as much as it has. And the principle is Intermediary Liability. 0:07:20.765,0:07:25.478 That if a site is online, it shouldn't be held liable for user-generated content if someone 0:07:25.478,0:07:28.703 puts something on there. You know it's gonna happen, so what's the mechanism you choose 0:07:28.703,0:07:33.246 to deal with it? If you make it so that the whole site goes down, you know blocked from 0:07:33.246,0:07:38.225 search results, money gets taken away, DNS goes away, then what is that gonna mean for it 0:07:38.225,0:07:42.763 and what is is gonna mean for the risk tolerance of venture capitalists who want to fund 0:07:42.763,0:07:44.097 the start-ups of tomorrow? 0:07:44.097,0:07:47.590 -Yeah a lot of people asking that question. What is it gonna mean for entrepreneurs, for start-ups, 0:07:47.590,0:07:50.692 for innovation? Well, a lot of people were calling it "the end of the Internet" 0:07:50.692,0:07:57.273 or "the breaking of the Internet". Hopefully they will, you know, come to some common sense 0:07:57.273,0:07:59.412 on this. Alexander, thanks so much for joining us tonight. 0:07:59.412,0:08:01.366 -Thank you for inviting me.