Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (14 page)

One of the complaints we’ve heard is that such past prior restraint cases do not apply here since “copyright infringement is illegal.” But, both defamation and child pornography also break the law. The point is that in all of these cases, there are existing laws on the books to deal with that specific content, which can be handled with a scalpel. Adding an additional layer that takes down an entire publication is where it stretches into clear censorship.

The other argument that says COICA (and its successor bills) were not censorship is that the legislation claims that it was only directed at sites “dedicated to infringing activities” that have “no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than” infringement. However, what supporters of COICA hate to admit is that “dedicated to infringing activities” is very much in the eye of the beholder, and the same folks who supported COICA—such as the MPAA and the RIAA—have a very long and troubled history of declaring all sorts of new technologies as “dedicated to infringing activities.” The VCR, cable TV, the DVR, and the MP3 player were all lambasted as being dedicated
to infringing activities with no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose, when each was introduced. In hindsight, supporters of COICA liked to ignore this, and insist they always knew that each of those technologies could have perfectly legitimate non-infringing uses. But that’s only because they were allowed to go forward after a series of legal fights. With COICA, no such chance would have been given. It’s easy to declare something as dedicated to infringing activities if your financial or political interests make you unwilling to see how it can be useful.

The fight to stop SOPA culminated in the Internet Blackout of January 18th, 2012. However, for Demand Progress and Don’t Censor the Net, the effort started nearly a year and a half earlier. Our work, in turn, was made possible by decades of activism by a number of organizations and myriad activists who’d been toiling to keep the Internet free and open. This string of essays tells the story of the effort to defeat SOPA and its predecessor and companion bills, beginning with Demand Progress’s entry into the fray in the fall of 2010
.

Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal speaks at a recent panel on civil liberties.

David Segal is the executive director of the Demand Progress. He was previously a city councilman in Providence, Rhode Island and a state representative representing Providence and East Providence. He ran for Congress in 2010. His writing on a variety of topics has appeared in a number of outlets, such as the
New York Times
and Boston Globe
.

The Senate staffer certainly wasn’t enthused. We’d created a petition in opposition to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act—we’d branded it as the “Internet Blacklist Bill”—and written it up on a few websites. We had front-page placement on the Huffington Post, and Boing Boing had given us a great write-up; somehow, within a week or so, three hundred thousand people had made known their opposition to the bill. We’d eventually understand this to be an opening grassroots salvo in what would become the movement that killed SOPA, but this guy seemed to be overestimating our standing: Aaron and I certainly didn’t feel all that formidable at the time, as we flitted between Senate offices, handing staffers stacks of signatures, hoping the recipients might be at least conscientious enough to toss them into recycling bins rather than trash cans.

I’d called Leahy’s office to let them know that there was now officially a popular movement in opposition to COICA and to try to get a meeting with his staff. A member of the corps of lawyers who worked for Leahy’s powerful Judiciary Committee returned the call an hour later. Leahy was wrong on this issue—he’d been very supportive of Hollywood’s interests during his lengthy Senate tenure—but he had a record of support for online privacy rights, so we hoped that we’d be able to work with him.

I was still technically a Rhode Island State Representative, a lame duck about to retire—or at least take a break—from a nearly decade-long career in politics that had chewed up most of my 20s. I’d lost a Democratic primary for Congress a couple months prior during which I’d garnered the support of a number of progressive Netroots groups, one of which was called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and had been co-founded by whiz kid Aaron Swartz, renowned across the web for his Python coding skills and Internet evangelism. Aaron was based in Boston and spent much of the last couple months of my campaign camped out in our Providence headquarters, helping us rig up cheap polls and robo-calls and that sort of thing. One day he told me he was quitting PCCC; and here I was, six weeks later, working with him at Demand Progress as we began our quest to save the Internet.

COICA would’ve created a list of “rogue” websites that the government could block access to with minimal due process. Perhaps even worse: it would create a second accounting of sites that wouldn’t formally be blocked—because the Feds only had much weaker cases against them, even by the bill’s
lax standards—but would be put on a separate, public list of sites that the U.S. government wasn’t very happy with. Internet Service Providers would then be encouraged to steer users clear of them. Hence the “blacklist bill” framing.

Leahy’s guy agreed to see us, and Aaron came down from Boston to join. I think we were all a bit surprised that we actually managed to have a genial, even if mostly unproductive, meeting. There was one concern they even seemed to take seriously: we suggested that at the very least the bill could be amended to make it clear that it wouldn’t apply to domestic sites, since the government would have ways of getting at “rogue” domestic operators that didn’t entail the obliteration of speech rights. (That change would eventually be made in a later draft, but was countervailed by enough new disconcerting language that we couldn’t claim a win.)

We did pick up a fascinating new tidbit or two as we roamed the Hill that day: the one that stuck with me was that one of the leading proponents of the bill—in addition to Hollywood, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the other usual suspects whose prints were all over the thing—was Deckers Shoes. You see, they own the brand Ugg, and the struggle they face—apparently worthy of legislation that would sabotage the fundamentals of the web—is that the term “ugg” is one of common usage in Australia and New Zealand: it denotes a whole variety of sheepskin boot. Deckers wanted to be able to block Americans’ access to sites that claimed to sell lower-case uggs, based eight thousand miles or so from the shores of the continental USA, foisting on unsuspecting Americans shoes that actually had some modicum of cultural relevance somewhere.

What problem was this legislation solving, at the risk of disrupting the business models of myriad web-based firms and undermining Americans’ freedom to connect online? Deckers manufactures Uggs in China at bottom-of-the-barrel wages; COICA would help them hock their wares in the United States at a markup relative to manufacturers of generic uggs, reducing consumer surplus that could be saved or spent somewhere more useful. It would help the management of Deckers make more money and protect various other special interests. Meanwhile, Internet usership now approaches breather-of-air as an interest of general concern, the epitome of “un-special” interests. (Some of the considerations relative to the impact of COICA, PIPA, and SOPA on Americans’ access to pharmaceuticals are similar, and illuminated in more detail in an essay later in this book.) Yet a bipartisan group of senators was proudly promoting this legislation.

Deckers’ website still admonishes visitors to “Beware fake Uggs,” but it strikes me that the decades-old, lower-case version has a stronger claim to legitimacy.

We navigated the bowels of the Capitol complex that afternoon, dodging stacks of cardboard moving boxes piled full with the belongings of defeated and otherwise departing members, and dropped in on Matt Stoller. Matt was a friend and had spent the previous two years working for Congressman Alan Grayson. ( He was, sadly, among said defeated members, but recently scrapped his way back in and will be installed as part of the 113th Congress in January.)

Somewhat unusual on the Hill, Matt and his boss actually paid attention to the nitty-gritty of policy considerations (they’d been providing critical oversight of the largess that ordinary Americans had bestowed upon the banks in the wake of the economic collapse). Matt had cut his chops as an early blogger and online activist and so cared deeply about bills that might compromise Internet freedom. He was one of the few House staffers who had even heard of COICA at this early stage. We wanted to know what he thought we should do, whom we should talk to about lining up (virtual) bodies to stand with us. One critical tip: some guy named Patrick Ruffini. We also wanted to make sure that conservatives on the Hill were aware of the legislation, and so alerted Ron Paul’s office to it before we left the Capitol grounds that day.

The Judiciary Committee passed COICA unanimously a few weeks later, but it was clear that the bulk of its members had very little concept of what they were voting on, and certainly no notion whatsoever of the movement that would build in opposition to COICA’s successor bills, SOPA and PIPA. One senator expressed dismay eighteen months later when I reminded him that he’d helped vote COICA out of committee; he’d always been sympathetic to the concerns of Internet users, was now an avowed opponent of SOPA, and his conception of self was such that he literally couldn’t believe that he’d voted for such a bad bill.

Then Ron Wyden intervened, putting a “hold” on COICA, and the process ground to a halt until the new Congress was installed in January. Demand Progress had a list of three hundred thousand new members who would comprise a key regiment in the anti-SOPA grassroots army, and whose ranks would swell to about one million before the bill was put to bed: thank you, Hollywood!

Patrick Ruffini is an entrepreneur and the founder of Don’t Censor the Net, an organization that supports freedom of speech and commerce on the Internet. Ruffini and Don’t Censor the Net were early opponents of SOPA/PIPA and organized support against the bills’ predecessor bill, COICA. Ruffini is also the founder of digital strategy firm Engage, which specializes in working with technological innovators. An award-winning political strategist, his writing has appeared in The
Atlantic, The National Review,
and other outlets
.

One of my earliest memories of being politically active on the Internet came when I placed a blue anti-censorship ribbon and blacked out my website in the wake of President Clinton’s signing of the Communications Decency Act, part of a broader 1996 overhaul of telecom law. The CDA’s goal: outlawing “indecent” pornographic material on the Internet.

Even before the act was—inevitably—struck down as unconstitutional, it’s safe to say that the law did very little to actually stem the flow of such content.

On February 1, 1996, the Web went dark after Congress passed a bill censoring the Internet. Sixteen years later, the Internet was just a bit more ahead of the game, using a massive blackout on January 18, 2012 to stop an all-important Senate vote on the Protect IP Act. Rather than an ineffectual, after-the-fact protest, 2012’s blackout would generate hundreds of thousands of phone contacts to Capitol Hill, with lawmakers falling all over themselves to remove their names from PIPA, and its House companion, the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.

The Internet has been at the center of my story in the intervening years. In the late ‘90s, I stumbled on the Internet as a remarkably effective tool for political organizing, eventually using it to build a career in Republican politics. I started emailing with pollsters, IM’ing with fellow activists, and setting up an online community ahead of the 2000 election that caught the attention of Karl Rove.