Blog

2012/01/12

Congressman Rogers,

My name is Clint Bellanger. I'm an employee for Auburn University. I write library software that supports the cutting-edge research and innovation of our faculty and staff. I work around and create new copyrighted material every day.

I'm writing you today about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261.

In its current form, SOPA gives tremendous power to Copyright holders. Unfortunately it does this at the expense of Constitutional Rights and with a terrible burden to law-abiding business owners.

Any systems that can be used to thwart copyright enforcement are made illegal under the proposed act. This definition is too broad. It includes projects like TOR, developed by the U.S. Navy to grant anonymity to online users. Online anonymity is critical to the military, journalists, and law enforcement (not to mention ordinary citizens).

Under the proposed act, a judge can immediately block any website found guilty of hosting copyrighted material. Almost all web sites today are built on user-generated content. I'm not just talking about the massive sites like Facebook and YouTube; even small business owners and innovators must have user-driven web sites to be competitive. To abide by SOPA, websites would have to manually approve every user comment, every photo upload, every video clip posted, or risk being eliminated from the Web. US-based companies could not be competitive at that speed.

Compare this enforcement provision to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which currently provides a fair system for Copyright owners to issue takedown notices to web sites. This takedown system actually works for law-abiding websites. I understand that SOPA intends to target rogue websites, but it's not specific enough; SOPA in its current form would bring the US business infrastructure to a screeching halt.

The act would be ineffective against actual copyright infringement sites. Black-listing a website only bans one address. Rogue piracy sites are known for moving addresses often (cost to create a new address? About $10). So the main enforcement of SOPA is trivial for law-breakers, but a tremendous burden for legal business owners.

Please consider supporting amendments to this bill, or alternate bills that address these issues.

Thanks for your time,

Clint Bellanger