Two proposed laws meant to combat Internet piracy sparked online protests Wednesday as Google sported a large black bar on its website and Wikipedia went dark for the day. And with that, politicians began to reverse themselves and withdraw their support for the bills. Good. Laws that cannot respect both freedom of expression and property rights need to be reconsidered. There is no reason to create tension between two basic rights.
The Houses Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senates less harsh Protect Intellectual Property Act called SOPA and PIPA would permit the Justice Department to shut down websites that allow or encourage copyright infringement.
The bills backers include the recording industry, the motion picture industry, unions and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They want to stop the illegal downloading of music, television shows and movies they say is costing U.S. jobs.
The problem is that most of the websites focusing on illegal downloads are overseas and out of reach of U.S. authorities. So, under SOPA and PIPA the government could get a court order to force search engines such as Google which presumably have done nothing wrong to remove links to those sites. It could also make advertisers cut off payments to the offending websites
The technology industry is understandably concerned about where that approach could be headed. Almost any online search is liable to produce links to copyrighted material such as newspapers. Whether a copyright violation occurs typically has more to do with what the user does with the material than with what the search engine provided.
The situation is complicated by the proliferation of sites made up of user-provided content. YouTube, Facebook and others could be at risk with almost every posting.
Backers of the bills point to the foreign sites as their focus. Critics, however, rightly argue that future officials may have their own ideas as to whom to target and why.
There is no reason to think the major search engines have an interest in furthering copyright infringements. As the New York Times reported in copyrighted material found through an online search current law requires websites to remove copyrighted content if asked to by the copyright holder. Google, says the Times, got 5 million requests to remove content last year and says it acts on such requests within six hours.
The bills backing seems to be slipping away. The Denver Post reported that Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who had supported the bills, on Tuesday pointed to valid concerns about potential unintended consequences that could result from it in its current form. (Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., does not support PIPA.) Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a co-sponsor of the Senate bill, reversed himself, saying he no longer supported it.
But another Republican said it best. As reported in the New York Times, on his Facebook page Texas Sen. John Cornyn said, Stealing content is theft, plain and simple, but concerns about unintended damage to the Internet and innovation in the tech sector require a more thoughtful balance, which will take more time.
He is right. The Internet, search engines and online content are part of contemporary life. That is no reason to allow users to trample intellectual property rights, but neither is it a reason to risk damaging a vibrant part of the economy.
