From Public Knowledge
On February 6, 2012, approximately 70 grass-roots groups, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, human rights groups, communities of color, and Internet companies sent a letter asking Congress to stop its work on intellectual property issues in the wake of massive public protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).
Public Knowledge-Internet Letter to CongressDear Congress:
We the undersigned groups align ourselves with the more than 14 million Americans who joined
us in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).
Together we participated in the largest online protest in American history (currently estimated at
more than 115,000 websites) because we believe these bills would have been harmful to free
speech, innovation, cyber security, and job creation. We want to thank the Members of Congress
who shared our concerns and opposed these bills.
Now is the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from a fresh
perspective. A wide variety of important concerns have been expressed – including views from
technologists, law professors, international human rights groups, venture capitalists,
entrepreneurs, and above all, individual Internet users. The concerns are too fundamental and
too numerous to be fully addressed through hasty revisions to these bills. Nor can they be
addressed by closed door negotiations among a small set of inside the-beltway stakeholders.
Furthermore, Congress must determine the true extent of online infringement and, as
importantly, the economic effects of that activity, from accurate and unbiased sources, and weigh
them against the economic and social costs of new copyright legislation. Congress cannot
simply accept industry estimates regarding economic and job implications of infringement given
the Government Accountability Office’s clear finding in 2010 that previous statistics and
quantitative studies on the subject have been unreliable.
Finally, any future debates concerning intellectual property law in regards to the Internet must
avoid taking a narrow, single-industry perspective. Too often, Congress has focused exclusively
on areas where some rights holders believe existing law is too weak, without also considering the
ways in which existing policies have undermined free speech and innovation. Some examples
include the year-long government seizure of a lawful music blog (dajaz1.com) and the shutdown
by private litigation of a lawful startup video platform (veoh.com).
The Internet’s value to the public makes it necessary that any legislative debate in this area be
open, transparent, and sufficiently deliberative to allow the full range of interested parties to
offer input and to evaluate specific proposals. To avoid doing so would be to repeat the mistakes
of SOPA and PIPA.Public Knowledge
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