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Common Sense and SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act)

-- written December 28, 2011

As SOPA is drafted at present, no thinking person could possibly support it. It would give unheard-of censorship power to the Department of Justice and would have numerous foreseeable negative consequences. For example, it would cripple the internet as it exists today and would remove Google, Yahoo and Bing from their positions as market leaders in internet searches in favor of less-restricted foreign search engines. Plainly, this would move U.S. jobs overseas.

Worst of all, Congressman Marsha Blackburn claims (in public) to be staunchly anti-regulation, but she co-sponsored this bill. The same woman who is so “anti-regulation” that she leapt to the defense of Gibson Guitar's right to use foreign endangered lumber instead of the home-grown kind – literally jumping in front of an ongoing federal investigation – now finds herself to be regulation-loving. The same politician who is in the fore of (correctly) lambasting Eric Holder's mismanagement of The Fast and the Furious wants to turn over our right to use the internet to the management of the same man.

What gives? Well, the answer isn't hard to find. We're coming up on an election year. Some heavy-hitting lobbyists are behind SOPA: the MPAA and other media conglomerates, including ones that own record labels, pay their D.C. firms well. And these big corporations and interests are tired of seeing their bottom-line eroded by the theft of their products. These corporations, like Gibson and its Brentwood CEO, have deep pockets and are spreading around a lot of free cash and campaign ads to get the most draconian version possible of an anti-piracy law through Congress. Congressman Blackburn isn't the only co-sponsor they bought. This bill has a total of 31 of them, from both parties.

I'm not unsympathetic to the companies' plight on this issue. After all, music and movies are two of the few things that we still make in this country that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And maybe there's a legislative solution to the piracy problem. But the current poorly drafted, excessively restrictive and potentially unconstitutional bill that is SOPA is not it. We can't let Congress get away with passing this.

SOPA is a perfect example of the type of lobbyist-written legislation that's often pushed through the process by members of Congress who don't read the bills they sponsor and who don't fully understand the consequences of the bills that the lobbyists hand to them. Members of Congress push this type of legislation through in order to secure more campaign money and free campaign advertising from groups with deep pockets and to keep that money and advertising from their opponents.

I don't want anyone shutting down the internet: not corporations (that's why I support net neutrality, unlike Congressman Blackburn) and not the U.S. government (that's why I oppose SOPA as it's written today). Right now, the internet carries the promise of bringing democracy back to our broken electoral system. Defending a return to democracy – in place of a cash-driven special-interest system like the one we have now – should be something that transcends the political left or right and unites us all.