The ACLU’s Rights Blog posted today on the controversy over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the post mentions the ACLU’s constructive role in limiting this latest regulatory overreach. (See, Online Protest Over SOPA Helps » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.) I have reproduced parts of their post below.
It’s telling that senators didn’t start bailing on restrictive legislation (PIPA in the Senate, SOPA in the House) until major websites went dark temporarily (Wikipedia, Reddit) or displayed protest banners (Google, many others).
Big Content got worried not when ordinary people complained, but when Internet powerhouses growled and a few big political sites made threats.
(One reason that more Senate Republicans than Democrats have bailed is because the highly-influential conservative blog redstate.com threatened GOP candidates who supported SOPA or PIPA.)
Hollywood’s really not thinking about ordinary consumers’ complaints on Facebook or Twitter, but when Facebook’s founder and then Google complain, or when a political site warns legislators about what’s in store, results come quickly.
Here’s an except from the ACLU’s blog:
Today, major tech advocates are dimming their websites in protest over a proposed new law that would result in our government blocking access to websites that contain copyright infringing material. And they’re right to be concerned.
There are two bills pending before Congress — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate — that would not only impact unlawful infringing content, but also a wealth of completely legal content that has nothing to do with online piracy.
We opposed SOPA in its original form mostly because the impact on non-infringing content would violate the First Amendment right to free speech of the owners and authors of that content, as well as the rights of Internet users to access that content. In fact, we were asked to present our views at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee scheduled for today and submitted our testimony in preparation for that hearing. But the hearing was postponed after SOPA’s proponents promised to significantly change the bill and after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor proposed not to bring any bill to the floor for a vote unless it represented a true consensus of those who support and those who oppose SOPA.
Because of those developments over the weekend — and because the White House also issued a statement opposing any bill that would impact First Amendment-protected online content — we are redoubling our efforts to find the compromise that will not only inhibit online infringement of original works of art, but also will truly eliminate online access restrictions to lawful non-infringing content….
