Abhiroop Basu

Brake the Internet Pirates - WSJ Comes Out in Support of SOPA and PIPA

The amount of FUD being spread by the WSJ is inversely proportional to the amount I’m going to read it from now onwards.

How’s that for irony: Companies supposedly devoted to the free flow of information are gagging themselves, and the only practical effect will be to enable fraudsters. They’ve taken no comparable action against, say, Chinese repression.

Because the WSJ has been a champion against Chinese repression. 

Meanwhile, the White House let it be known over the weekend in a blog post—how fitting—that it won’t support legislation that “reduces freedom of expression” or damages “the dynamic, innovative global Internet,” as if this describes the reality of Internet theft. President Obama has finally found a regulation he doesn’t like, which must mean that the campaign contributions of Google and the Stanford alumni club are paying dividends.

About the same as the amount Murdoch is putting into the coffers of SOPA supporters in the US House of Representatives.

The House bill known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and its Senate counterpart are far more modest than this cyber tantrum suggests. By our reading they would create new tools to target the worst-of-the-worst black markets. The notion that a SOPA dragnet will catch a stray Facebook post or Twitter link is false.

But, it gives unprecedented extra-judicial powers to random individuals who can block legitimate sites doing business. For example, a few years ago popular podcast network Revision3 was blocked after an overzealous “defender of copyright” by the name of MediaDefender determined that the Bittorrent tracker being used by Revision3 to share their podcasts was actually sharing pirated material. Without actually checking the content of the files being shared they simply DDoSed the Revision3 site completely taking it down for a long period of time. Where there any repercussions? No. In fact the backers of MediaDefender include the likes of Sony, Universal Music, the RIAA, and the MPAA.

The bill would allow the Attorney General to sue infringers and requires the Justice Department to prove in court that a foreign site is dedicated to the wholesale violation of copyright under the same standards that apply to domestic sites. In rare circumstances private plaintiffs can also sue for remedies, not for damages, and their legal tools are far more limited than the AG’s.

This passage is at the heart of the problem behind both SOPA and PIPA. Firstly, foreign websites will be effectively unable to represent themselves in a US court of law. A one-sided legal argument will ensure in which the foreign site will be blocked. This is akin to the Great Firewall of China, no-one in the United States (“the land of the free”) will be able to visit the blocked foreign website. The second issue is that of private plaintiffs. WSJ correctly points out that these ought to be “rare cases”, however as we all know in legal jargon an exception generally becomes the rule. In most cases we will see large content conglomerates flipping the switch and blocking any website hosted outside the US which has anything remotely resembling infringing material.

PLEASE STOP THE FUD!