Join the fight against Internet censorship: An open letter to Senators Murray and Merkley

Edi­tor’s Note: The fol­low­ing is the text of a let­ter sent by NPI to the offices of U.S. Sen­a­tors Pat­ty Mur­ray of Wash­ing­ton and Jeff Merkley of Ore­gon this morning.

Dear Sen­a­tors Mur­ray and Merkley:

On behalf of the team at the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute, I am writ­ing to express our strong oppo­si­tion to two bills cur­rent­ly before Con­gress that we believe would stop inno­va­tion and erode dig­i­tal free­dom. These bills – H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Pira­cy Act (SOPA) and S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) – have been mov­ing towards the Sen­ate and House floors for sev­er­al months, but have not received much pub­lic debate or scruti­ny until very recently.

Although these bills are not iden­ti­cal, they con­tain many sim­i­lar­i­ties, and we believe each deserves to be reject­ed –  a view shared by Google ‚Yahoo, AOL, eBay, Twit­ter, Face­book, OpenDNS, the Free Soft­ware Foun­da­tion, Mozil­la, Tum­blr, the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, Pub­lic Knowl­edge, the Cen­ter for Democ­ra­cy and Tech­nol­o­gy, Free Press, MoveOn.org, Dai­ly Kos, LinkedIn, Zyn­ga, and many oth­er com­pa­nies, indi­vid­u­als, and orga­ni­za­tions. (See a more com­plete list).

“These bills were writ­ten by the con­tent indus­try with­out any input from the tech­nol­o­gy indus­try. And they are try­ing to fast-track them through Con­gress and into law with­out any nego­ti­a­tion with the tech­nol­o­gy industry.”

— Ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Fred Wil­son, Octo­ber 29th, 2011

The pur­pose of these bills is osten­si­bly to pro­vide bet­ter reme­dies under fed­er­al law to deal with cas­es of copy­right and trade­mark infringe­ment. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, these bills, PIPA and SOPA, were draft­ed by the enter­tain­ment indus­try, for the enter­tain­ment indus­try – with­out broad input.

They are so flawed, in fact, that an increas­ing num­ber of artists and musi­cians are speak­ing out to make it clear that pow­er­ful trade groups like the U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce, the Motion Pic­ture Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca (MPAA), and the Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca (RIAA) do not speak for them.

Dig­i­tal free­dom, net neu­tral­i­ty, user con­sent, and inter­op­er­abil­i­ty are all pol­i­cy direc­tions that NPI cares deeply about. Before NPI exist­ed phys­i­cal­ly – before it exist­ed legal­ly – it exist­ed vir­tu­al­ly, as an idea on the world wide web. That idea – to build a think tank with the soul of a tech start­up – could not have tak­en root or been embraced by a larg­er group of peo­ple with­out the Internet.

It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that NPI, like many of the afore­men­tioned com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions, owes its exis­tence to the Inter­net – a rev­o­lu­tion­ary medi­um for com­mu­ni­ca­tion unlike any oth­er humankind has ever invented.

“What the bills pro­pose would be akin to requir­ing the phone com­pa­ny to be respon­si­ble for the legal­i­ty of every phone call that takes place. With that kind of reg­u­la­tion, com­pa­nies will spend more on lawyers and lit­i­ga­tion than they will on hir­ing and inno­vat­ing. Exist­ing laws like the Dig­i­tal Mil­len­ni­um Copy­right Act already pro­vide a sat­is­fac­to­ry legal frame­work to remove copy­right infringe­ment and enforce intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty rights.” 

— David Ule­vitch, the CEO of OpenDNS, the world’s largest DNS and Inter­net secu­ri­ty service.

Pri­or to the cre­ation of the Inter­net, an artist or an activist had to go through gate­keep­ers to get pub­lished or get on-air.

Com­mer­cial print­ing press­es, radio sta­tions, and tele­vi­sion net­works were – and still are – con­trolled by gatekeepers.

But the Inter­net is dif­fer­ent. The Inter­net allows peo­ple to get their ideas out with­out hav­ing to go through a gate­keep­er. In a mat­ter of hours, any­one who wants to make his or her voice heard can set up a blog on Word­Press or Tum­blr, cre­ate a social net­work­ing account on Twit­ter or Face­book, or join a wiki… and begin build­ing an audi­ence. And mil­lions of peo­ple have done just that.

Besides allow­ing peo­ple to freely share ideas, the Inter­net has also allowed peo­ple to freely share soft­ware, movies, music, games, books, and oth­er cre­ative works which are often lumped togeth­er under the label con­tent or intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the enter­tain­ment indus­try often makes it sound as if all online shar­ing on the Inter­net is hap­pen­ing against the wish­es of rights hold­ers. (Fre­quent­ly, spokes­peo­ple for the indus­try equate the words online shar­ing with a more omi­nous-sound­ing word… pira­cy). But this is sim­ply not the case.

Many artists, activists, and orga­ni­za­tions (includ­ing NPI) active­ly encour­age the shar­ing of their cre­ative works and make this legal­ly pos­si­ble by using what is known as a copy­left license – such as Cre­ative Com­mons or the GNU GPL.

The word copy­left is a play on the word copy­right, and it refers to the idea of using copy­right law to encour­age shar­ing and reuse under cer­tain con­di­tions (some rights reserved vs. all rights reserved). The author or cre­ator of the work retains the copy­right, but through the license, grants per­mis­sion for the song, book, video, pho­to­graph, com­put­er pro­gram, record­ing, paper, or oth­er work to be repro­duced and shared by any­one who would like to enjoy it – through the world wide web, through peer-to-peer net­works, through email, or through oth­er means.

Most of NPI’s works are released under a Cre­ative Com­mons copy­left license which requires attri­bu­tion and addi­tion­al­ly spec­i­fies that all reuse of our mate­ri­als must be noncommercial.

It is no acci­dent that a good deal of the oppo­si­tion to Pro­tect IP and SOPA stems from with­in what Cre­ative Com­mons founder Lawrence Lessig has called the free cul­ture move­ment – a world­wide social and polit­i­cal move­ment that believes deeply in the free exchange of ideas and information.

The free cul­ture move­ment also believes that dra­con­ian copy­right laws lead to a sit­u­a­tion that Colum­bia Law School Pro­fes­sor Michael Heller calls the tragedy of the anti­com­mons – the waste of a resource due to too much ownership.

“By mak­ing cul­ture too hard to assem­ble, we silent­ly dimin­ish our own col­lec­tive wealth. And the great­est harm occurs along the fron­tiers of inno­va­tion, includ­ing artis­tic expres­sion,” Heller says in his 2008 book The Grid­lock Economy.

Copy­left can help pre­vent tragedies of the anti­com­mons, but the pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tion to free cul­ture that copy­left is cur­rent­ly mak­ing could be can­celed out by PIPA or SOPA.

Either of these bills, if enact­ed, would hin­der inno­va­tion, sti­fle free expres­sion, and endan­ger Amer­i­ca’s moral stand­ing by sup­press­ing speech with­out prop­er notice and hear­ing, break­ing the infra­struc­ture of the Inter­net, and under­min­ing U.S. lead­er­ship in the world com­mu­ni­ty on civ­il lib­er­ties issues.

House Demo­c­ra­t­ic Leader Nan­cy Pelosi has cre­at­ed a fit­ting hash­tag on Twit­ter that apt­ly sum­ma­rizes the posi­tion of those of us opposed to these bills: #Dont­Break­TheIn­ter­net.

“Although the prob­lems the Act attempts to address – online copy­right and trade­mark infringe­ment – are seri­ous ones pre­sent­ing new and dif­fi­cult enforce­ment chal­lenges, the approach tak­en in the Act has grave con­sti­tu­tion­al infir­mi­ties, poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous con­se­quences for the sta­bil­i­ty and secu­ri­ty of the Inter­net’s address­ing sys­tem, and will under­mine Unit­ed States for­eign pol­i­cy and strong sup­port of free expres­sion on the Inter­net around the world.”

— Excerpt from a let­ter oppos­ing Pro­tect IP and SOPA, signed by more than more than a hun­dred of the most respect­ed law pro­fes­sors from across the Unit­ed States

The Inter­net is the great­est con­duit for free cul­ture that has ever exist­ed. We must pro­tect and strength­en it, not crip­ple it. These bills – Pro­tect IP and SOPA – amount to the prover­bial cure that’s worse than the disease.

Your seat­mates in the Unit­ed States Sen­ate – Maria Cantwell and Ron Wyden – are already on record as opposed to these bills.

In a let­ter to Sen­a­tors Har­ry Reid and Mitch McConnell (also signed by Repub­li­cans Rand Paul of Ken­tucky and Jer­ry Moran of Kansas), they write:

We are par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned that the pro­pos­al autho­rizes the use of reme­dies that will under­mine the infra­struc­ture of the Internet.

The nation’s lead­ing tech­nol­o­gists and secu­ri­ty experts say these pro­vi­sions will kill our best hope for actu­al­ly mak­ing the Inter­net more secure against cyber attacks. We take seri­ous­ly the alarm expressed by the nation’s lead­ing investors in new online star­tups who say the pro­pos­al will damp­en inter­est in financ­ing the new ideas and busi­ness­es of tomor­row, and to legal and human rights experts who cau­tion that the pro­pos­al enables the silenc­ing of speech.

We ask that you join Sen­a­tors Cantwell, Wyden, Paul, and Moran in pub­licly tak­ing posi­tions against PIPA and SOPA. We believe unit­ed oppo­si­tion to these bills from the Pacif­ic North­west­’s del­e­ga­tion would help spur our nation to have a more open, con­struc­tive con­ver­sa­tion about how to min­i­mize copy­right and trade­mark infringe­ment with­out endan­ger­ing dig­i­tal freedom.