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

Not much to do with computer networks

[walterbyrd]

You really don't need to know much about the details of TCP/IP, or DNS, to understand these proposed laws.

The idea of these laws is to circumvent the standard law enforcement process.

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

[dgatwood]

You've got it half right. What we need are the Facebooks and Googles of the world to work together for the common good.

All it would take is one ad campaign in which the first time each U.S. user logged into Facebook on a particular day, they would initially see a bleak, grey-looking Facebook. Every YouTube video on their site, every photo, and every link to every website would be replaced with the words "This content has been removed due to a copyright claim." Superimposed across the top of the screen in large letters would be the words, "If SOPA and PIPA pass, this is what Facebook will look like." Below that would be two links: "Tell me more" and "I don't care about freedom on the Internet. Just take me to Facebook." Either button would reset Facebook to normalcy, but the first button would take you to a Facebook page explaining the laws and why they are bad. At the bottom of the page would be links to email forms for the appropriate congresspeople based on the user's current address.

The key, however, is to do this not just for Facebook, but also for Google image searches, YouTube searches, etc. Every high profile site that is involve in video sharing has to do it on the same day. Such an ad campaign only has to happen once and I can pretty much guarantee that SOPA and PIPA would be buried for years. The hard part is convincing Facebook and Google to work together to put together such an ad campaign and stick their necks out that far in the interest of protecting their users. It's possible, but I'm not holding my breath.