The SOPA fight from the internet of old may be back for another round as the MPA is working with congress for another attempt.
The fight to put the brakes on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) may be headed for a round two. Some readers here might not know what this fight was all about as it happened over a decade ago, so here’s a bit of a refresher.
SOPA was a mass internet censorship bill. The idea is that rights holders like those represented by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) or the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) want the ability to censor any website they want. All they have to do is accuse a website of being “dedicated to piracy” and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are then obligated to block access to it. In short, rights holders are pushing to be judge, jury, and executioner of any website based on a simple whim.
It’s controversial for a huge pile of reasons. As many in the copyright debates know, copyright abuse is the biggest problem with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It has gotten to the point where an army of bots are scouring the internet and hammering any and every website with false copyright strike notices. Anything with a certain detected keyword gets slammed with takedown notices. Google, in this case, acted as a defence mechanism and has to sift through the tens of millions of often automated complaints to determine which complaint is legitimate and which is not. Because there’s no enforceable part of the DMCA that holds those sending false notices accountable, the barrage of censorship orders only continues.
Over top of this is the well known problem of some people using the DMCA to silence critics. When someone doesn’t like what is said, then they file a fraudulent DMCA takedown notice in the hope that the legal implications would compel the victim into silence via taking down their content. This despite what was posted being perfectly legal.
What SOPA aims to do is take this problem and pump it with steroids. Instead of having to go through the trouble of identifying “infringing” content, large corporations are trying to lower the standard and are asking for the ability to accuse a website of simply being “dedicated to piracy” and getting ISPs to order a website be blocked without question.
The copyright industry took things a step further and pushed a companion piece of legislation known as PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) at the senate in a bid to ensure that they get this unprecedented new censorship power.
Shortly after I launched this website, I published a retrospective on what happened after. In short, the Internet at large stood up and had a massive protest against the bill. This was known as the blackout protests. Participants included some of the largest websites on the planet at the time. US lawmakers, at the time, tried to push back against these protests, claiming that their bill is perfect and it’s the internet that’s wrong here. Nevertheless, the pressure persisted and ultimately succeeded. Lawmakers were forced to shelve both bills and they simply never brought those bills back.
In 2013, there was worried that a SOPA 2.0 in the works, but luckily, those efforts seemed to fizzle in the end. The internet, ultimately, got to breathe a sigh of relief because the internet killing legislation ultimately never came to be.
So, you can imagine my profound disappointment when I read about how lobbyists are pushing to bring SOPA back. You’d think that with the different market conditions and legal alternatives, the copyright industry would be less militant as they got their troves of wealth through the internet thanks to third parties intervening. Alas, that is not the case. More than a decade later, it sounds like the copyright industry is working to resurrect this fight. From TechDirt:
It’s been twelve years since the big SOPA/PIPA fight. I’ve been talking with a few folks lately about how it feels like many people have either forgotten that story or weren’t paying attention when it happened. Two years ago, we did a 10-year retrospective on the fight, and it feels like some people need a refresher. Most notably, Charles Rivkin, the head of the MPA (formerly the MPAA), certainly appears to need a refresher because he just announced it’s time to bring back SOPA.
And so of course the MPA and Rivkin are trying to bring it back. In a speech earlier this week, Rivkin laid out the “state of the industry.” He pulled out all the old debunked hits from a decade ago about how piracy was killing Hollywood and blah blah blah. The problem is, it’s just not true. Earlier this year we released our latest Sky is Rising report, which again showed that Hollywood is thriving, and that piracy was never a particularly serious problem.
Indeed, the only reason there’s recently been a small increase in infringing use is because the big streaming companies (who are all members of the MPA) have started implementing a bunch of bullshit policies designed to annoy users and to squeeze them for more money, while giving less in return. The cause of piracy is the MPA members themselves.
But, alas, Rivkin insists that site blocking is the only answer to his own members’ failures to treat customers right:
So today, here with you at CinemaCon, I’m announcing the next major phase of this effort: the MPA is going to work with Members of Congress to enact judicial site-blocking legislation here in the United States.
For anybody unfamiliar with the term, site-blocking is a targeted, legal tactic to disrupt the connection between digital pirates and their intended audience.
It allows all types of creative industries – film and television, music and book publishers, sports leagues and broadcasters – to request, in court, that internet service providers block access to websites dedicated to sharing illegal, stolen content.
Let’s be clear: this approach focuses only on sites featuring stolen materials. There are no gray areas here.
Site-blocking does not impact legitimate businesses or ordinary internet users. To the contrary: it protects them, too.
And it does so within the bounds of due process, requiring detailed evidence establishing a target’s illegal activities and allowing alleged perpetrators to appear in a court of law.
Almost everything Rivkin says here is bullshit. Hollywood is thriving these days. They had a blip due to COVID, but there is no indication, at all, that “piracy” has ever been a problem, let alone now. Rivkin tosses out bullshit numbers claiming massive job and revenue losses from piracy, and those numbers come from laughably bad studies that often assume every infringing copy is a lost sale. Or they lump in claims of “trademark infringement” to argue that every counterfeit product is the same as someone downloading a movie they would never have paid for in the first place.
But, more importantly, site blocking is 100% prior restraint and unconstitutional in the US. There is no serious due process in any site blocking regime, and every attempt has resulted in all sorts of bogus blocks and takedowns, many of which we’ve detailed over the years.
The hope at this point is that this remains to be little more than something that is talked about in the halls of Congress and doesn’t lead to the same nightmare scenario I saw back in 2011. If not, we could soon be in for the battle for the very existence of the internet as a whole – a battle the internet fortunately won all those years ago.
