Law Professors On SOPA and PIPA: Don't Break the Internet

An anonymous reader writes "Law professors Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post have just published a piece on the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. In Don't Break the Internet, they argue that the two bills — intended to counter online copyright and trademark infringement — 'share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet's addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet's extraordinary growth, and for free expression.' They write, 'These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country's tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.'"

Comments

Re:Lawyers, Judges, Representatives, Senators, ...

[justdiver]

They've been weighing in this whole time... http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/top-internet-engineers-warn-against-sopa/2011/12/15/gIQAGRV4vO_blog.html Perhaps you were reading the wrong articles? To quote from the linked article: "Vint Cerf of Google, domain name system software author Paul Vixie and Internet routing engineer Tony Li were among 83 high-profile engineers who signed an open letter to Congress in opposition to the House Stop Online Privacy Act and Senate Protect Intellectual Property Act."

Re:This will not pass...

[Andy Dodd]

1) It's unfortunately looking very likely these will pass.
2) Death warrant or not, you have to follow the law
3) If it passes, the article points out some good legal challenges that will likely cause the act to be struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

Re:Lawyers, Judges, Representatives, Senators, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez, you really haven't been paying much attention, have you?

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress

Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

Blacklisting Provisions Remain in Stop Online Piracy Act

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) urged panelists to remove the DNS and firewall aspects of the bill.

Rep. Mel Watt (D-North Carolina) said he was not a technological “nerd,” but said he did not “believe” security experts who said that the internet would become less secure unless Issa’s amendment was adopted. “I’m not a person to argue about the technology of this,” Watt said before he voted against the amendment. Issa’s amendment failed 22-12.

Congressional SOPA hearings: no opponents of the bill allowed
Nov. 15

As the House of Representatives opens hearings on SOPA, the worst piece of Internet legislation in American history, it has rejected all submissions and testimony from public interest groups and others who oppose the bill.

        Irony Alert: The House is holding hearings on sweeping Internet censorship legislation this week -- and it's censoring the opposition! The bill is backed by Hollywood, Big Pharma, and the Chamber of Commerce, and all of them are going to get to testify at the hearing.

        But the bill's opponents -- tech companies, free speech and human rights activists, and hundreds of thousands of Internet users -- won't have a voice.

There is plenty of commentary by tech people out there on the detrimental effects to the internet by SOPA and PRO-IP. Just fucking google it.