White House Responds to Online Piracy Petitions
EmailAs the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and complementary bills make their way through Congress, the Obama administration responded today to two online petitions regarding the measures. The petitions, each of which had been signed by more than 51,000 people as of press time, were filed through the White House’s “We the People” online initiative.
The administration would not openly condemn or affirm the legislation, but cautioned in a blog post that it would not support any bill that did not “guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.”
The White House said piracy was a “real problem” that affects small content providers and the largest movie studios, but had to be approached without undermining freedom of expression or entrepreneurship. The statement also calls on private entities such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to take voluntary action in protecting online rights while reducing piracy.
SOPA is designed to combat “rogue sites,” or foreign websites run out of countries that may have more lax copyright enforcement than the United States. The bill would allow the federal government to bring these sites to court. But as lawsuits against a foreign website could prove long and fruitless, the bill would also force search engines to cease displaying links to the sites if mandated by a court order. Meanwhile rights-holders could request the court to deny credit card companies from servicing the offending site.
A controversial measure would have also required ISPs to redirect consumer traffic from the sites. On Friday SOPA’s sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, announced he would remove that provision amid concerns from security experts who say it could undermine an ongoing government effort to secure the Internet’s infrastructure.
The White House seemed to echo that sentiment.
“Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online,” the White House statement said.
Proponents of the bill, chief among them the Motion Picture Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, say the law is necessary to prevent hundreds of thousands of entertainment industry jobs being lost to online piracy. But critics say it amounts to excessive online censorship and is fundamentally against the open nature of the Internet.
This week several Internet companies announced they would join a collective web “blackout,” or site shut-down on Jan. 18 to protest SOPA, with Wikipedia mulling joining the fray. A number of top tech executives have openly criticized SOPA, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Google’s Sergey Brin, and Elon Musk, founder of Paypal and Tesla Motors.
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The SOPA is a big threat to one of the last bastions of freedom of expression, the internet. I neither support nor condone copyright or trademark infringement, but the SOPA’s provisions come perilously close to throwing out the baby of freedom of expression with the bathwater of protectionism. If rights holders feel their rights have been infringed, they should follow due process and pursue the specific violator in court. The SOPA allows the blocking or shut down of entire websites without due process if someone posts something that may infringe. This would leave websites such as YouTube vulnerable to blocking or shut down simply because someone not associated with YouTube did something like post a home made video playing commercially produced music in the background. I understand that is a “no-no” and the copyright holder should be able to demand that the video be removed if they discover it, however, they should not be able to shut down YouTube. The SOPA is simply their attempt at a cheap workaround the legal system and due process. Rights holders should take a few individual violators to court and due the pants off them. That should discourage a lot of the casual piracy that takes place. The protection of due process is too important to sacrifice to SOPA. It protects both the rights of the accuser and the accused as well as innocent bystanders. Don’t give the Chamber of Commerce and their cronies any more power to erode consumer rights and freedom of expression than they already have. Also, those of you who so casually infringe copyrights, etc., need to stop. It is theft, and you are also playing into the hands of those who wish to diminish consumer rights for other reasons.
Posted by: Thinks2010 | January 14, 2012, 5:03 pm 5:03 pm
OMG ABC, Daddy Disney actually LET you post a little article that mentioned SOPA/PIPA! The world must be about to end! …Wait… oh yeah… it’s about OBAMA, so it’s okay. Even if it is nothing more than him kinda sorta not really opposing or supporting it, but doing a lot of mumbo-jumbo political-speak trying to just be able to say he’s ‘made a stand’. Even removing the DNS section, or other tiny various sections aren’t going to make those horrid proposed legislations any better. There are so many things wrong with them across the board, they need to be tossed completely. Do they seriously want to start putting regular citizens in jail for five years for downloading a song? Really? REALLY? People get less time for selling drugs, assault, B&E, and even vehicular manslaughter. I guess Hollywood needs that money bad… after all, those stars can never have too many $25,000 purses.
Posted by: AC | January 14, 2012, 6:17 pm 6:17 pm
My concern is twofold. 1. The bill allows the government discretionary power over the internet. Regardless of the ‘intent’ for any new law that gives the government such power, the history of our government has proven where there is a crack in any door they will find a way to smash it down and enter your home. President Obama’s Administration may claim that they are only interested in limiting unlawful activity, but adding a new law that gives a government agency the power to determine what is or what isn’t unlawful is not the way to go. Furthermore since they are able to classify the activity as unlawful it stands to reason laws ALREADY exist to stop the activity. The government and the large corporations paying for this law to be shoved through our nations lawmaking process should explore existing legal avenues prior to making the mistake of allowing government to control key components of the internet. look at the rights guaranteed to us in the constitution and compare them to the rights any of us can reasonably expect to have today. I’m so glad that on the subject of NDAA President Obama pledges HIS administration would never interpret it to allow for the indefinite detention of American citizens without due process of law. Even if President Obama held true to that pledge there is no guarantee another administration would. The law gives the government the ability, the foot in the door, as does SOPA/PIPA.
2. My second concern is the budgetary impact of creating another government agency to be the internet watchdog. SOPA/PIPA is going to cost taxpayers MONEY. They have no plans how to regulate how much money will be spent, nor are there any provisions for how much it is going to cost in the budget. Believe me, the government has never worried about how much a new law was going to cost to implement, but as a taxpayer, I care as should anybody reading this. Bigger/more complex government, cost taxpayers more than money.
Posted by: Ryan Davidson | January 15, 2012, 1:56 am 1:56 am
Don’t people realize, that freedom is a myth in America?
Don’t they realize that the tendency to steal, is rampant on the internet?
Don’t they have any sense?
To stop theft, because people not only are willing to steal, but they encourage theft, the freedom of the internet will be sacrificed. Their personal freedom will be sacrificed. They have no one to blame, but themselves.
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Posted by: Debbra Nang | February 20, 2012, 2:07 pm 2:07 pm