Opinion | Online Piracy and Political Overreach (original) (raw)

Opinion|Online Piracy and Political Overreach

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/opinion/online-piracy-and-political-overreach.html

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Editorial

Jan. 18, 2012

For months, it seemed as if Congress would pass an online antipiracy bill, even though its main weapons — cutting off the financing of pirate Web sites and making them harder to find — risk censoring legitimate speech and undermining the security of the Internet. But the unmovable corporations behind those bills have run into an unstoppable force: an outcry by Internet companies led by Google and Wikipedia that culminated in an extraordinary online protest on Wednesday.

Lawmakers have begun peeling away from the bills, notably Senators Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who cosponsored the Senate version, and John Cornyn, the powerful Texas conservative. They dropped out after Wikipedia’s English language site went dark and Google put a black bar on its homepage on Wednesday.

The Protect I.P. Act would have easily passed the Senate last summer if not for a hold placed by Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon. The Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced in the House in October, has also lost some of its initial backers. And on Saturday, the White House released a statement warning that it would “not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

Though we are encouraged by legislators’ newfound caution about the potential consequences of the bills, Congress must keep working on ways to curtail the growing business of foreign rogue Web sites trafficking in counterfeit goods and stolen intellectual property.

The Internet industry was pitted against some of the best-honed lobbying groups, including Hollywood and the recording studios, the United States Chamber of Commerce and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. The industry has made a good case that some of the definitions of wrongdoing — like “facilitating” intellectual property infringement — were overly broad. They said allowing property rights owners to direct payment companies like Visa and ad networks like Google’s to stop doing business with sites they deemed infringing — with no penalties if they were proved wrong— could stymie legitimate online expression.

They made the case that the proposal to make infringing Web sites “disappear” from the Internet by forbidding search engines from finding them or redirecting their Web addresses to other Internet domains was easy to get around and could potentially undermine efforts to stop hackers from doing exactly the same thing.

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