Stop PIPA and SOPA

Floor Speech

Mr. DeFAZIO. PIPA, Protect Intellectual Property Act; SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act. Now, who could be against bills like that, to prevent the theft of intellectual property or online piracy, to prevent online piracy. Clever names, great. Content, not so much.

Now, the worst, organized, government-sanctioned theft of intellectual property in the world goes on day in and day out in Communist China. And this government has done precious little to rein that in. We run a huge trade deficit with China. We're buying their goods. They are dependent upon our purchasing of their goods. And yet we allow them to get away with that. This bill does nothing to deal with the organized theft in Communist China, which is the greatest problem that confronts us in the theft of intellectual property.

Now, concealed behind these really benign names and embedded in the text is something that's kind of like what we call malware. Now, we all know what malware can do to our computers. We've seen it; the black screen of death. Well, this is a little bigger than malware that gets on your computer, steals your data, or crashes your computer. It could crash the entire Internet and the productivity of the Internet.

Now, eventually this legislation could threaten the existence of an entire domain because of one blog entry, one user link. A whole domain could be taken down. Wow. That's pretty incredible. Imagine how some of these user-content sites are going to have to try and police things.

Well, they can always err on the side of censorship because there are broad provisions in this bill to allow you in good faith to censor something because you thought maybe it was a problem. So they could start censoring rather dramatically. The legislation also includes very broad language for so-called anti-circumvention, that is any site that provides information that could--could, maybe, possibly--help users get around censorship would be a target. Well, that's kind of an interesting contradiction for the government of the United States because actually we promote through the State Department software that helps democratic activists in Communist China, which I already mentioned, and in Iran and other vicious dictatorships around the world to get around their government's online censorship. We're now going to enshrine principles that would allow this sort of censorship, sort of mimicking some of the actions of the Iranian and the Communist Chinese, I guess, in regards to the Internet here. Of course, we're going to allow private companies to impose this censorship instead of the government imposing this censorship; but they would have government enforcement behind their actions, the private right of actions that would be allowed in this bill.

This is pretty extraordinary legislation, very poorly drafted. If you didn't care about the Internet, if it didn't exist and you wanted to put in the toughest possible protections theoretically for piracy and intellectual property, maybe you'd write something like

this. But there's a better way to go than to kill the Internet at the same time as you're trying to get at these few bad actors that are out there, let alone the state bad actors, like China.

I'd love to see a bill drafted to take on the Chinese on their multi-billion-dollar annual theft of intellectual property from the United States. Everybody says we can't take on China; no, they're too big. So instead, we'll go after small, creative people who could tread across this line unknowingly who are participating in a much larger site. They have their blog as part of that site or they have their post as part of that site. The whole site could be taken down.

This legislation, I'm pleased to say, that it seems like the White House has woken up to the dangers here; the fact that we are essentially creating the PATRIOT Act national security letter provisions for private companies to censor the Internet. We cannot let that happen. We must stop this legislation. We also need to take on meaningfully piracy and the theft of intellectual property.

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