[Chapter-delegates] Tomorrow Hearing on SOPA in U.S. House of Representatives

Thu Nov 17 04:47:40 PST 2011

Hi Dan,

The APC people are endorsing the letter below, together with a growing
number of NGOs and movements worldwide. I wonder if ISOC global and/or
the chapters could do the same?

fraternal regards

--c.a.

Carlos A. Afonso
ISOC BR

========
The Letter:
Re: H.R.
          3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act

Dear Chairman Smith and Ranking Member Conyers,

As press freedom and human rights advocates, we write to express our
deep concern with H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). While
this is a domestic bill, there are several provisions within SOPA that
would have serious implications for international civil and human rights
which raise concerns about how the United States is approaching global
internet governance. The United States has long been a strong advocate
for the protection and promotion of an open Internet. However, by
institutionalizing the use of internet censorship tools to enforce
domestic law in the United States creates a paradox that undermines its
moral authority to criticize repressive regimes. We urge the United
States to uphold its proclaimed responsibility as a leader in internet
freedom and reject bills that will censor and fragment the web.

Through SOPA, the United States is attempting to dominate a shared
global resource. Building a nationwide firewall and creating barriers
for international website and service operators makes a powerful
statement that the United States is not interested in participating in a
global information infrastructure.
Instead, the United States would be creating the very barriers that
restrict the free flow of information that it has vigorously challenged
abroad. By imposing technical changes to the open internet while eroding
due process, SOPA  introduces a deeply concerning degree of legal
uncertainty into the internet economy, particularly for businesses and
users internationally. Business cannot be conducted online when
international users and businesses do not have faith that their access
to payments, domain names, and advertising will be available, raising
challenges to economic development and innovation.

This is as unacceptable to the international community as it would be if
a foreign country were to impose similar measures on the United States.

The provisions in SOPA on DNS filtering in particular will have severe
consequences worldwide. In China, DNS filtering contributes to the Great
Firewall that prevents citizens from accessing websites or services that
have been censored by the Chinese government. By instituting this
practice in the United States, SOPA sends an unequivocal message to
other nations that it is acceptable to censor speech on the global
Internet. Additionally, Internet engineers have argued in response to
the Protect IP Act, DNS filtering would break the internet into separate
regional networks. Worse still, the circumvention technology that can be
used to access information under repressive Internet regimes would be
outlawed under SOPA, the very same technology whose development is
funded by the State Department.

SOPA puts the interests of rightsholders ahead of the rights of society.
SOPA would require that web services, in order to avoid complaints and
lawsuits, take “deliberate actions” to prevent the possibility of
infringement from taking place on their site, pressuring private
companies to monitor the actions of innocent users. Not only will this
effectively moot the safe harbor protection provided in the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), but the proposed legislation would
disproportionally affect small online communities who lack the capacity
to represent their users in legal battles. Wrongly accused websites
would suffer immediate losses as payment systems and ad networks would
be required to comply with a demand to block or cease doing business
with the site pending receipt of a legal counter-notice. Even then, it
would still be at the discretion of these entities to reinstate service
to the website regardless of the merits of an alleged rightsholder’s
claim,  robbing online companies of a stable business environment and
creating a climate where free speech is subject to the whims of private
actors.

Censoring the internet is the wrong approach to protecting any sectoral
interest in business. By adopting SOPA, the United States would lose its
position as a global leader in supporting a free and open Internet for
public good.

The international civil and human rights community urges Congress to
reject the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Best regards,

Access
Bits of Freedom (The Netherlands)
Center for Internet and Society (India)
Communication Is Your Right!
Consumers International
Digital Rights Ireland
FGV (Brazil)
Free Press
May First/People Link
MobileActive Corp
Virtual Activism ...

========

On 11/16/2011 03:26 PM, Dan York wrote:
> Marcin,
> 
>> What's ISOC position in this?
> 
> 
> I'm not on the public policy side of ISOC and therefore can't give an official "position" on SOPA, but I would note that in response earlier this year to the U.S. Senate version of the SOPA bill (called the "PROTECT-IP Act"), the Internet Society published this whitepaper outlining in very clear terms why the technique of DNS Filtering would not work and would be dangerous to the Internet infrastructure:
> 
> http://www.isoc.org/internet/issues/dns-filtering.shtml
> 
> (PDF download links are at the bottom of that page)
> 
> As a U.S. citizen, I have personally emailed the PDF of that whitepaper to my senators and representatives along with my personal comments.  I have also been passing that link along through social networks so that people have some way to learn more about the technical issues behind the mechanisms proposed in SOPA and PROTECT-IP.
> 
> Regards,
> Dan
> 
> --
> Dan York
> Senior Content Strategist, Internet Society
> york at isoc.org   +1-802-735-1624 
> Jabber: york at jabber.isoc.org 
> Skype: danyork   http://twitter.com/danyork
> 
> http://www.isoc.org/
> 
> On Nov 15, 2011, at 3:03 PM, Marcin Cieslak wrote:
> 
>> http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/hear_11162011.html
>>
>> Witness List
>> Maria Pallante
>> Register of Copyrights
>> U.S. Library of Congress
>>
>> John Clark
>> Chief Security Officer and VP of Global Security
>> Pfizer
>>
>> Michael O'Leary
>> Senior Executive Vice President
>> Global Policy and External Affairs
>> MPAA
>>
>> Linda Kirkpatrick
>> Group Head
>> Customer Performance Integrity
>> MasterCard
>>
>> Katherine Oyama
>> Policy Counsel
>> Google
>>
>> Paul Almeida
>> President
>> Dept. of Professional Employees
>> AFL-CIO
>>
>> What's ISOC position in this?
>> What does it take to be invited to a hearing?
>>
>> //Marcin
>> _______________________________________________
>> Chapter-delegates mailing list
>> Chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/chapter-delegates
> 
> 
> 
> 
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