Venture capitalist, Fred Wilson, said that SOPA and PIPA “were written by the content industry without any input from the technology industry.”As he wrote in a blog post, “these bills are positioned as necessary actions to prevent “online piracy” particularly from rogue sites outside of the US. The technology industry is certainly concerned about online piracy. It has developed both protective technologies like DRM and alternative distribution services like premium streaming audio and video services such as Netflix, Spotify, and many others. These protective technologies and alternative distribution services have significantly cut the amount of online piracy in the past decade. An executive from Viacom testified recently in Congress that the vast majority of piracy is limited to ‘about twenty websites’. So the technology industry has done a lot to help the content industry get a handle on online piracy in the past decade.”
According to Wilson, the content industry is “trying to fast track” SOPA and PIPA “through Congress and into law without any negotiation with the technology industry.” House Judiciary Committee members have received impressive fact-filled letters and papers from Internet and other technology leaders. Still, lawmakers have yet to offer these experts the opportunity to formally testify about the implications of the proposed legislation at either private or public hearings.
Gary Shapiro, CEO and President of the Consumer Electronics Association, wrote in his recent Forbes article that during the Judicial Committee sessions, SOPA supporters “disregarded all facts showing why their solution is worse than the problem. Opponents (including CEA) argued how the bill would hurt America’s cyber security, the technical integrity of the Internet, start-up Internet companies and websites with user-generated material. Our opposition included technologists who built the Internet and thousands of entrepreneurs and web designers who are concerned about how the legislation could affect the health of the Internet. Yet the bill’s supporters could only repeat the horrors of web piracy and ask how anyone could oppose legislation designed to reduce it. So much for weighing all the facts.”
Various individuals and organizations are calling upon the public to add their voices to the growing grassroots opposition to both SOPA and PIPA. For example, the Avaaz web site has collected over one million signatures on its “Save the Internet!” online petition. “By going too far,” said Shapiro in The Hill (a Washington blog), “the content lobby has jolted Americans into an awareness that Congress needs to hear more than content lobby voices when considering copyright legislation. The future of the Internet, and the freedom it has fostered, is at stake.” There is still time to call or write members of Congress to express opinions about the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act.
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