The guy who's been trying to combat secret holds has put the non-secret variety of hold to good use. He's blocked the "Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act" (COICA), legislation that was moving quickly, and quietly, through the Senate. Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's summary.
Although it is ostensibly focused on copyright infringement, an enormous amount of noninfringing content, including political and other speech, could disappear off the Web if it passes.
The main mechanism of the bill is to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS), which translates names like "www.eff.org" or "www.nytimes.com" into the IP addresses that computers use to communicate. The bill creates a blacklist of censored domains; the Attorney General can ask a court to place any website on the blacklist if infringement is "central" to the purpose of the site.
If this bill passes, the list of targets could conceivably include hosting websites such as Dropbox, MediaFire and Rapidshare; MP3 blogs and mashup/remix music sites like SoundCloud, MashupTown and Hype Machine ; and sites that discuss and make the controversial political and intellectual case for piracy, like pirate-party.us, p2pnet, InfoAnarchy, Slyck and ZeroPaid. Indeed, had this bill been passed five or ten years ago, YouTube might not exist today. In other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous. (Why would all these sites be targets?)
The bill was passed out of the Judiciary Committee Thursday, Nov. 18, possibly on its way to a unanimous consent vote on the floor before Wyden put a hold on it.
Wyden called the bill the "wrong medicine" for dealing with online copyright infringement. The bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice to seek expedited court orders requiring U.S. domain-name registrars to shut down domestic websites suspected of hosting infringing materials. The bill would also allow the DOJ, through court orders, to order U.S. ISPs to redirect customer traffic away from infringing foreign websites.
"Deploying this statute to combat online copyright infringement seems almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb, when what you need is a precision-guided missile," Wyden said during a hearing on digital trade issues. "If you don't think this thing through carefully, the collateral damage would be American innovation, American jobs, and a secure Internet."
The bill is overkill, giving the government far too-reaching new copyright enforcement powers, including completely shutting down sites if infringement, or even links to infringement, if the Attorney General deems that the site's "central" purpose is infringement. There's already a remedy for copyright enforcement in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which allows copyright holders to remove their copyrighted content from a Web site without actually taking down the whole site.
(Disclaimer: I previously worked for Sen. Wyden when he was a member of the House.)
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