The House Judiciary Committee is debating mark-up on the Stop Online Piracy Act right now. There's a lot of writing about the Act, its sister act (classic movie...) in the Senate, PROTECT-IP, and a newly-circulated draft alternative called OPEN. The latter is co-sponsored by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), and even has a fancy website.
I'm not going to re-hash all the arguments here. Nate Anderson at Ars Technica's Law & Disorder blog is decidedly anti-SOPA and PROTECT-IP (as am I, admittedly), but it has a good summary of all the positions. Below, I've embedded recent versions of SOPA, PROTECT-IP, OPEN, a letter written by three law professors (including Professor David Post of Temple Law, whose copyright class I took this semester) and signed by 110 of their colleagues, and a blockquote of the open letter companies like Facebook and Google have signed, warning people about the problems with SOPA.
I like primary sources, and since I haven't had time to read these proposals myself, I wanted to present them all in one place instead of adding to the wrong side of this debate's signal-versus-noise ratio. So, without further ado:
Stop Online Piracy Act of 2011
Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011
Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act of 2011
Law Professors' Letter Against SOPA and PROTECT-IP
Open Letter to Washington from Several Large Internet-Based Companies
(Source: VentureBeat)
An Open Letter to Washington:
We’ve all had the good fortune to found Internet companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.
However we’re worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act — which started out as well-meaning efforts to control piracy online — will undermine that framework.
These two pieces of legislation threaten to:
Require web services, like the ones we helped found, to monitor what users link to, or upload. This would have a chilling effect on innovation;
Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran; and
Undermine security online by changing the basic structure of the Internet.
We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.
Signed by:
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet
Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!
Image via Wikipedia
This was originally posted to joeross.posterous.com.
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