SBOT Computer & Technology Section

As many have noticed, several prominent websites (Wikipedia, Boing Boing, and many other) have gone “black” today in protest of certain legislation pending in the U.S. Congress. There are two pieces of legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) H.R. 3261 and the very similar but more tailored Protect IP Act (“PIPA”) S. 968. Both of the acts are promoted by the Music and Movie industries (among other large content providers). Essentially, the closed-content industries are trying to preclude access to websites that they content holds/links/streams their content. In order to preclude that access, however, the law will affect some of the Internet’s fundamental infrastructure, particularly the Domain Name System (“DNS”). DNS is the technology that translates http://www.google.com (that humans understand) into http://209.85.229.104 (that the Internet routers understand). Both SOPA and PIPA would impose a duty on those organizations that run their own DNS servers (which includes large law firms, companies, state and local government agencies and many others) to blacklist sites identified by court order. Many of these companies do not like the idea of being held responsible for the policing of some other company’s business model. Worse, the law is written vaguely, and is thus ripe for abuse — hence the protests by companies large and small, as well as by many other civil groups and individuals.

At the moment, SOPA appears stalled because of the protests. However, the sponsor of PIPA is trying to get a vote on the legislation early next week.

There is a good paper, entitled “Don’t Break the Internet” by Mark A. Lemley (Stanford Law School), David S. Levine (Elon University School of Law; Stanford University – Center for Internet and Society), & David G. Post (Temple University School of Law). The article was published in the Stanford Law Review Online, Vol. 64, p. 34, December 2011. Here is the Abstract:

Two bills now pending in Congress – the “Protect IP Act” (“Protect IP”) in the Senate, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (“SOPA”) in the House – represent the latest legislative attempts to address online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they 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.