NO SOPA: 'American Censorship Day'

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on their version of the bill known as SOPA or the Stop Online Piracy Act. The Protect IP Act would allow the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites they see as engaging in infringing activities, to be blocked by ISP providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks all without a court hearing or trial. Numerous groups have come out against it but will Congress listen. O'Reilly Media's Alexander Howard discusses.

Well today has been dubbed "American Censorship Day".

An incredible amount of opposition is mounted towards legislation working its way

through both the House and the Senate to combat copyright infringement on the web.

Now we've spoken about the PROTECT-IP Act many times on this show,

but today, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on their version of the bill,

known as SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act". The PROTECT-IP Act would allow the attorney general

to create a blacklist of websites that they see as engaging in "infringing activities"

to be blocked by ISP providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks,

all without a court hearing or a trial. But SOPA goes even further.

And numerous groups have come out against both pieces of legislation,

from civil liberties and free speech groups like the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

various think tanks, a bipartisan group of lawmakers including Ron Paul,

more than 100 legal scholars, and even tech giants.

Take a look at this full-page ad taken out in the New York Times today.

It was taken out by AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga.

So much opposition, might Congress actually listen?

Here to discuss it with me is Alexander Howard, the Government 2.0 Washington correspondent

for O'Reilly Media. Alexander, thanks so much for being here tonight.

-Nice to be here.

-OK like I said, our viewers are very familiar with the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA),

but let's talk about what the differences are between PIPA and SOPA,

why this is one considered to be so much worse.

-Well I think one of the ways that people tend to look specifically at is this Private Right of Action

and you referred to that a little bit, which is to say that someone who has the ownership

to a given piece of content and feels it is infringing could then go right to the Department of Justice

and do that in a way that is not necessarily public and then make a complaint against it.

And then it would give the Department of Justice certain powers to then take that site offline.

And you talked about a number of them: the idea that you could take it out of search results,

the way you could constrain it financially, and then, potentially most controversial, which is

using the Domain Name System to make it so that when people search for the domain of the site,

they simply couldn't find it.

-OK, but how about the fact too, that some of these companies, now, if something is posted online

that might be infringing on copyright, as soon as they're notified, they just take it down.

But, won't they be held responsible now that they're gonna have to start blocking it,

censoring it from the very beginning, they'll face legal repercussions if it ever gets up there?

-Right, I mean the existing infrastructure for this is the DMCA, you do a DMCA takedown.

If you are a company, you see something of yours up on YouTube for instance, and say you have

ownership to that, the individual piece of content gets taken down. And that's seen

some amount of abuse, but it's been a workable system that basically says:

If you see infringing content on a given site, a given piece, you take that off.

What this bill has been introduced around is this idea of rogue websites that are outside of the US.

And Congress, with the urging of a lot of people who have sponsored the bill

and the people you saw testify today, are interested in finding ways to prevent these rogue websites

beyond US jurisdiction from being able to host, or link to, pirated content.

And there are only so many means you can do that.

The one that I think there's broad consensus around is following the money.

You know changing the way that you could fund these sites though advertising

or through payment mechanisms, the same thing in fact that has been used to strangle WikiLeaks.

But one that's quite controversial in the Internet community is this idea of using

the Domain Name System (DNS) to do that.

-Alright, let's in fact talk about the hearing today and who was there. I already mentioned

the long list of the tech giants, organizations out there, members of Congress

that are all opposed to the legislation. But the people who are backing it, you have

the Chamber of Commerce, you have the Motion Picture Association,

you have a lot of the entertainment industry. How come they, or how come the opposition

wasn't allowed to speak or voice their concerns today at this hearing?

-You would have to ask Representative Smith and the heads of the Judicial Council.

-But did they give no explanation?

-To my understanding, the Consumer Electronics Association, which is the biggest of its kind,

asked to testify and did not have the opportunity. If you took a picture of that table of people

that was there, the only one, from the companies you referenced, the biggest Internet companies

in the world, was Google. And that representative had a pretty tough time today,

a lot of tough questions from the Congressmen.

You didn't see constituencies from the venture capital community, you didn't see

constituencies from public advocates, from civil right organizations, human rights organizations.

And, notably, you didn't see anyone from the engineering side. There was actually a specific point,

where one of the Congressmen raised this issue of whether this bill would be a problem for cyber security.

And as you know this is a huge issue in Washington, cyber crime has been growing,

it's a really important issue, [...] on the national stage a strategic bid.

So when someone brought up this idea that a past council of DHS, Lamar, I'm sorry...

Lamar Smith was reminded about this, his name was Mr. Baker, that this Domain Name System,

security was an issue, something that engineers had been working on for a long time.

-You'd think that this was something that members of Congress would care about as well...

-They do. And when it was raised, it came up "We should know about that", they asked

the witnesses about it. And this is called DNSSEC and it is basically trying to

build in more security to the Domain Name System. Because without it, there are some ways that

your traffic can be spoofed, which can be a significant issue if you're in parts of the world

where if your traffic is intercepted, it could be dangerous to you.

And essentially, something unusual happened: A group of Internet engineers wrote a letter

to Congress saying, "If you do this, it's gonna break what we've been building."

Now I don't know if you've hung out with many engineers, they don't usually like to

insert themselves in politics. But they have. So did a number of venture capitalists,

including Fred Wilson, including Brad Burnham and Feld, you know these don't get involved usually.

-So all about it, it seems rather crazy that the Congress wouldn't at least allow them

to come in and have their piece when they are going through this type of hearing process.

And so what do you think the chances are that some of this might actually go through,

either the Senate version or the House version?

-Well it depends who you talk to. If you talk to Darrell Issa, who is the Chairman on

Government Oversight, he told The Hill today that he doesn't think it's gonna get very far.

He thinks that the regulatory burden here is gonna actually be a significant oppositon.

The security is one important thing. People actually bark (?) at that, right?

-But do you think, really quickly because we're running out of time, but do you think that

this also equates us in terms of censorship, we've heard a lot of people say:

Well, we point fingers at China all the time and here our government would be setting

a very dangerous precedent, you know for what it looks like around the world.

-People perked up when the MPAA talked about that a little bit.

There is a very important op-ed written by Rebecca MacKinnon in the New York TImes today

and she entitled it "The Great Firewall of America", referring to China's censorship mechanism.

And this particular principle, this idea that a site should be held liable or not

for infringing content that's put on to it - The way we've made the Internet over the past

20 years has protected sites from doing it, it's really what has enabled the Internet

to grow as much as it has. And the principle is Intermediary Liability.

That if a site is online, it shouldn't be held liable for user-generated content if someone

puts something on there. You know it's gonna happen, so what's the mechanism you choose

to deal with it? If you make it so that the whole site goes down, you know blocked from

search results, money gets taken away, DNS goes away, then what is that gonna mean for it

and what is is gonna mean for the risk tolerance of venture capitalists who want to fund

the start-ups of tomorrow?

-Yeah, a lot of people asking that question. What is it gonna mean for entrepreneurs, for start-ups,

for innovation? Well, a lot of people were calling it "the end of the Internet"

or "the breaking of the Internet". Hopefully they will, you know, come to some common sense

on this. Alexander, thanks so much for joining us tonight.

-Thank you for inviting me.