The free and open nature of the internet is under attack...again. On the surface, this looks to be yet another battle in the long running war against piracy and copyright infringement. But if you dig deeper you find that it's a power grab that will stifle innovation and directly effect consumers. As a blogger who frequently links to websites to provide the necessary citations that enhance and inform a well written post, this worries
me. Why? There are those who don't accept our long established legal doctrine of fair use - the idea that you may use the content of others for limited purposes - and seek to exercise control over any and all use of their content. This bill, currently before the U.S. Senate, would allow the government to create blacklists of internet domains and order that they be taken down. It's a sort of draconian action that runs counter to the support for a free and open internet that President Obama says America stands for.
In practical terms for bloggers, I see it as an attack on the link culture of the internet. How many of you think nothing of linking to online content, sharing a link on Twitter, sending a movie review to friends, sharing a news report on Facebook, or sharing a video on YouTube? Link culture is fundamental to our modern way of communicating, yet there are those in the old media industries who seek to exercise control of their content so that sharing it, excerpting it, quoting it or tweeting it without their permission would be illegal. In other words, if I provide the following text from CNet News, some may find that to be infringing:
Killing legislation that would enable the government to shut down Web sites accused of piracy was a top priority for many technology trade groups today. Last week, a Senate committee stunned the tech sector by announcing it would try to fast-track a bill designed to grant the U.S. Department of Justice wide authority to combat illegal file sharing and counterfeiting. The bill, which was introduced in the Senate Judiciary Committee and backed by the committee's chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), could go to a vote in the Senate as early as tomorrow. Critics say the proposed legislation, known as the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, is nothing more than censorship and would heap the copyright-protection problems on companies that shouldn't bear the burden.
And, even more context from The Washington Post:
Some of the rock stars of Internet engineering (yes, they exist) on Tuesday protested a Senate bill aimed at fighting online piracy, saying the legislation could lead to censorship and destabilize the architecture of the Web. In their letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the 89 engineers said a bill proposed by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that would block the domain names for sites that engage in piracy and copyright infringement threatens to cause far-reaching harm. Specifically, early Internet systems creator David Reed and others said the bill could destabilize the domain name system used as an underlying infrastructure for the Web. The engineers said the measure could wipe out entire domain names, which are used to translate sites like www.washingtonpost.com into the Internet addresses used by computers to communicate with each other.
Will the Senate listen to those who actually created the internet, or will they listen to the well-paid lobbyists of the music and movie industries? It's time for some grass roots action before old media lock down the internet. Please join me in standing up for internet freedom and call your senators and tell them to oppose Senate Bill 3804.
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