Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat from Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has devoted much of his legislative career to defending civil liberties. In recent years, he has led a rearguard action to check the abuse of the sweeping surveillance powers the federal government claims under the Patriot Act. For weeks, he's been working with Kentucky's firebrand libertarian Sen. Rand Paul to phase out the law's most egregious provisions. And though Sen. Leahy hasn't met with much success, one can't question his sincerity in seeking to protect our constitutional freedoms.
So why is it that Leahy is pushing Protect IP, a legislative proposal that threatens to unleash a torrent of censorship? Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been a staunch ally of Leahy in the Patriot Act fight, has taken the extraordinary step of putting a hold on Protect IP, a sign that he at least understands that it would, in his words, "muzzle speech and stifle innovation and economic growth" by crippling the Internet.
The simple answer is that Leahy, like most members of Congress, has chosen sides in the long-running war between Hollywood and the Internet. Hollywood, led by the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, has been fighting to preserve its old business models in a changing environment. Hollywood's key weapon has been its massive political influence, which it has used to advance legislation like Protect IP.
Protect IP claims to be about combating online piracy, hence the bill's clever name (it stands for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property). Yet in the name of policing copyright violations, Protect IP effectively makes it a felony to link to a website that is accused — that's right, only accused — of being devoted to copyright infringement. As Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt explained to a press conference in London, Protect IP and laws like it will prove a "disastrous precedent" for free speech. He is absolutely right. Linking is the fundamental building block of the Internet, and hyperlinks are a form of free speech protected under the Constitution. Once the United States government starts messing with hyperlinks, every two-bit dictatorship on the planet will have carte blanche to do the same.
At its heart, Protect IP represents a form of legislative tinkering with domain name systems, or DNSs, which assign URLs to IP addresses. Sites that are deemed objectionable will have their domain names blocked. In case you think this process of declaring sites guilty will involve the due process rights that citizens of a free country have come to expect, think again. Sites can petition the federal government only after they've been blocked. Picture it: a judicial system in which defendants are thrown in jail without a trial, yet who can, from the comfort of their cell, request the courtesy of a hearing. Many guilty criminals would get locked up, and that's all well and good. The trouble is that many innocents will also get caught up in the net.
The worst part is that, as a number of DNS specialists have made clear, Protect IP will do little to limit access to sites that infringe on copyrights. Blocking a domain name is a bit like saying that no one is allowed to refer to me as "Reihan Salam" ever again. People will just call me "Ro Ro" or "3782643317," and I will hand them a pirated copy of the first season of "Boardwalk Empire." In a similar vein, users can just access IP addresses directly, or use shadow registration systems that work around the big Internet service providers. This would undermine the universality of domain names and, in effect, break the Internet into hundreds of pieces, many of which will go deep underground, where serious crime can flourish. The big ISPs won't be able to police this new underground, and neither will the feds. And so the war on the Internet will become a Vietnam-like quagmire.
Rather than fight an unwinnable war against the Internet, Hollywood needs to adapt. The real threat to the big entertainment conglomerates isn't file-sharing. Though file-sharing reduces revenues for recorded copies of movies and music, iTunes has demonstrated that consumers will pay for convenience. As UCLA sociologist Gabriel Rossman has argued, a far greater challenge to the existing entertainment industry is the rise of a la carte pricing. When consumers can buy an individual television program without paying for a premium cable package, they make it very difficult for content creators to invest in expensive, ambitious new programming. The result is that either the number of new programs will decline or production values will plummet. It's no wonder that many in the entertainment industry are terrified of the future.
To really win the hearts and minds of consumers, Hollywood needs to recapture the inventiveness and the risk-taking that defined its earliest days. The good news is that at least some entertainment execs are breaking out of their defensive crouch and embracing promising new business models, like the streaming-content site Hulu that mixes free and premium paid content. Once Hollywood learns to stop pouring money into lawyers and lobbyists and start putting it in the hands of tech-savvy visionaries, we'll all be better off.
So why is it that Leahy is pushing Protect IP, a legislative proposal that threatens to unleash a torrent of censorship? Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been a staunch ally of Leahy in the Patriot Act fight, has taken the extraordinary step of putting a hold on Protect IP, a sign that he at least understands that it would, in his words, "muzzle speech and stifle innovation and economic growth" by crippling the Internet.
The simple answer is that Leahy, like most members of Congress, has chosen sides in the long-running war between Hollywood and the Internet. Hollywood, led by the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, has been fighting to preserve its old business models in a changing environment. Hollywood's key weapon has been its massive political influence, which it has used to advance legislation like Protect IP.
Protect IP claims to be about combating online piracy, hence the bill's clever name (it stands for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property). Yet in the name of policing copyright violations, Protect IP effectively makes it a felony to link to a website that is accused — that's right, only accused — of being devoted to copyright infringement. As Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt explained to a press conference in London, Protect IP and laws like it will prove a "disastrous precedent" for free speech. He is absolutely right. Linking is the fundamental building block of the Internet, and hyperlinks are a form of free speech protected under the Constitution. Once the United States government starts messing with hyperlinks, every two-bit dictatorship on the planet will have carte blanche to do the same.
At its heart, Protect IP represents a form of legislative tinkering with domain name systems, or DNSs, which assign URLs to IP addresses. Sites that are deemed objectionable will have their domain names blocked. In case you think this process of declaring sites guilty will involve the due process rights that citizens of a free country have come to expect, think again. Sites can petition the federal government only after they've been blocked. Picture it: a judicial system in which defendants are thrown in jail without a trial, yet who can, from the comfort of their cell, request the courtesy of a hearing. Many guilty criminals would get locked up, and that's all well and good. The trouble is that many innocents will also get caught up in the net.
The worst part is that, as a number of DNS specialists have made clear, Protect IP will do little to limit access to sites that infringe on copyrights. Blocking a domain name is a bit like saying that no one is allowed to refer to me as "Reihan Salam" ever again. People will just call me "Ro Ro" or "3782643317," and I will hand them a pirated copy of the first season of "Boardwalk Empire." In a similar vein, users can just access IP addresses directly, or use shadow registration systems that work around the big Internet service providers. This would undermine the universality of domain names and, in effect, break the Internet into hundreds of pieces, many of which will go deep underground, where serious crime can flourish. The big ISPs won't be able to police this new underground, and neither will the feds. And so the war on the Internet will become a Vietnam-like quagmire.
Rather than fight an unwinnable war against the Internet, Hollywood needs to adapt. The real threat to the big entertainment conglomerates isn't file-sharing. Though file-sharing reduces revenues for recorded copies of movies and music, iTunes has demonstrated that consumers will pay for convenience. As UCLA sociologist Gabriel Rossman has argued, a far greater challenge to the existing entertainment industry is the rise of a la carte pricing. When consumers can buy an individual television program without paying for a premium cable package, they make it very difficult for content creators to invest in expensive, ambitious new programming. The result is that either the number of new programs will decline or production values will plummet. It's no wonder that many in the entertainment industry are terrified of the future.
To really win the hearts and minds of consumers, Hollywood needs to recapture the inventiveness and the risk-taking that defined its earliest days. The good news is that at least some entertainment execs are breaking out of their defensive crouch and embracing promising new business models, like the streaming-content site Hulu that mixes free and premium paid content. Once Hollywood learns to stop pouring money into lawyers and lobbyists and start putting it in the hands of tech-savvy visionaries, we'll all be better off.
