SOPA opera: Despite biased hearing, Google shocker, chances of passing nil

If the US government’s House Judiciary Committee wanted to court controversy, then they could have chosen no better way than to hold a clearly biased hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as they did on Wednesday. Of the six organisations invited to attend the Committee’s hearing, only Google was allowed to voice objections. Other organisations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo!, the Consumer Electronics Association, not to mention law professors and lawyers, were not given a seat at the table. Says Ars Technica:

Right from the start, the knives were out for Google. Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) made it only halfway through his opening statement before asserting that “one of the companies represented here today has sought to obstruct the Committee’s consideration of bipartisan legislation. Perhaps this should come as no surprise given that Google just settled a federal criminal investigation into the company’s active promotion of rogue websites that pushed illegal prescription and counterfeit drugs on American consumers.” SOPA would require search engines, payment processors, ISPs, and ad networks to block access to “rogue websites” on a judge’s order. While critics have raised serious concerns about how this could affect the Internet’s domain name system, affect free speech, and sweep in a host of legal sites, the bill’s backers suggested that it was really just about money. Google didn’t want to stop piracy because it made so much money from it.

But Google shocked observers by supporting financial embargoes against “rogue sites“, and citing Wikileaks as a reference: [caption id=“attachment_134521” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Screengrab from tumblr.com.protectthenet.”]  [/caption]

“You look at WikiLeaks. I think this is a good example of the fact that this a strong remedy: choking these sites off at their revenue source,” Google copyright policy counsel Katherine Oyama told the hearing. “I think [copyright infringing sites] are in business because they can sell advertising or because they can process from subscribers. If you could get the entire industry together and choke off advertising and choke off payments to those sites, you could be incredibly effective without introducing the collateral damage we discussed to free speech or internet architecture.”

A generous reading of this is that Google, alone and under attack, tried to come up with a ’least worst’ scenario to appease the Committee, which had already decided that Google was, along with all the other objectors, in league with the pirates. At least Oyama said that “You would have a court determine that a site is infringing and serve orders on US-based payment providers and advertising,” which is actually a step up from SOPA’s provisions, which require only an accusation from a copyright holder. But it’s a strange stance from Google, who have in the past actually refused to join in with other US businesses in summarily cutting off Wikileaks. Indeed, Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, said in January that they had “looked at the appropriateness of indexing WikiLeaks” and had “decided to continue. Because it’s legal.” SOPA has also garnered opprobrium from the European Parliament, which has adopted a resolution criticising the US practice of seizing domain names for sites it thinks are infringing copyright. US authorities started domain name seizures in 2010, despite widespread criticism, and the measure is included in SOPA. The US is already shutting down websites that are legal in the EU. TorrentFreak gives the example of Spanish site Rojadirecta, belonging to the company Puerto 80. Two Spanish courts have declared its activities legal, but the US authorities took the domain name anyway. But are we fretting over nothing? Reuters reports that Darrell Issa, the congressional representative for California, has said that there is no way that SOPA will pass. The Republican politician said:

"[There is] a very broad coalition from far left to far right who realise this will hurt innovation, something we can’t afford to do. And there are other ways to accomplish what they say is their goal. “I don’t believe this bill has any chance on the House floor. I think it’s way too extreme, it infringes on too many areas that our leadership will know is simply too dangerous to do in its current form.”

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That may be the case, but it’s not just the contents of SOPA that are worrying, but the blatant bias from the House Judiciary Committee and the anti-democratic way they have been trying to frogmarch the bill through with obscene haste. The lack of understanding amongst lawmakers of the very technology they are trying to legislate for is disturbing in the extreme, because even if SOPA fails, there will be other equally poor attempts to regulate the internet that might succeed. SOPA itself has now been referred to the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet.