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Over at C4SIF, I’ve blogged quite a bit lately about SOPA and PIPA and the recent Internet blackouts and other protests against these bills, which threaten free speech and the open Internet (Mike Masnick et al. at Techdirt have also been great on exposing and analyzing SOPA). As Jeff Tucker noted recently, the protests against SOPA started not with conservatives or even “libertarians,” but with civil libertarians of the “left,” as well as Silicon Valley tech types. Of course, some libertarians have been opposed to SOPA (and copyright) from the beginning–the more radical and anti-state libertarians, in particular Austro-libertarians and left-libertarians (such as some of the people associated with C4SS ).
Aside from the anti-state libertarians, however, most of the protests against SOPA concede that copyright is good, intellectual property is important, and piracy is bad–but then they bemoan that SOPA “goes too far.” For example, as I noted in Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?, consider this article in PC Magazine, providing the response of 11 PCMag staffers asked for their take on SOPA. The response to SOPA was universally negative, but most of them first prefaced their opposition to SOPA by genuflecting to copyright and recognizing that IP piracy “is of course a real problem”. [Keep reading…]
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Mike Masnick has this interesting post up today at Techdirt:
Crowd Cheers Loudly As All Four GOP Candidates Say No To SOPA/PIPA
from the national-issue dept
It really was just a few weeks ago that a Hollywood lobbyist laughed at me (literally) when I suggested that SOPA/PIPA might become a national issue during the Presidential campaign. As he noted, copyright issues just aren’t interesting outside of a small group of people. My, how things have changed. After this week’s protests made front pages and top stories everywhere, it’s not all that surprising that the candidates at the latest GOP debate were asked their opinion of the bills… and all four came out against them. Of course, this seems to fit with the new GOP positioning that they’re the anti-SOPA/PIPA party (so sorry Lamar Smith…). Mediaite has the video:
Masnick quotes each of the four candidates’ responses to the question. I provide them below, with “translations” provided by my friend Daniel Coleman for the three statist candidates:
Gingrich: “You are asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood? I am weighing it and thinking fondly of the many left wing people that I am so eager to protect. On the other hand, you have so many people that are technologically advanced such as Google and You Tube and Facebook that say this is totally going to mess up the Internet. The bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable. I believe in freedom and think that we have a patent office, copyright law and if a company believes it has generally been infringed upon it has the right to sue. But the idea that we have the government start preemptively start censoring the Internet and corporations’ economic interest is exactly the wrong thing to do.”
Translation: I joke about using power to hurt people who disagree with me on policy. But seriously, folks, this bill got way too unpopular for me to be able to support it. I think you need the powers of this bill vested differently so that it won’t cause as much of an outrage. [Keep reading…]
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