{"id":29460,"date":"2011-11-18T10:11:28","date_gmt":"2011-11-18T10:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=29460"},"modified":"2017-03-28T15:59:42","modified_gmt":"2017-03-28T14:59:42","slug":"usa-sopa-human-rights-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=29460","title":{"rendered":"US piracy law could threaten human rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SOPA\"<\/a>As debates continue around the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Cynthia M Wong argues that US policy makers must look more closely at whether the bill truly supports free expression<\/strong>
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\nIn a letter letter last month to Representative Howard Berman,\u00a0Hillary Clinton wrote<\/a>\u00a0that there is \u201cno contradiction between intellectual property rights protection and enforcement and ensuring freedom of expression on the Internet.\u201d While true, this statement sheds little light on concrete choices facing policy makers.<\/p>\n

Enforcing intellectual property rights and promoting Internet freedom are not — and should not be — mutually exclusive goals for the US government. Efforts to curb IP infringement in a manner that respects rule of law and free expression are not equivalent to government censorship.\u00a0 Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights<\/a> calls on states to multi-task, protecting the right to free expression, the right to participate in cultural life, and the right of artists to benefit from their works at the same time.\u00a0 Setting up a false dichotomy belies the harder questions at the heart of current debates around the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)<\/a>\u00a0and the Protect IP Act (PIPA)<\/a>\u00a0in the US: the question isn\u2019t whether to protect, but how to protect intellectual property in the Internet age.<\/p>\n

And the inconvenient truth is that the \u201chow\u201d really matters. \u00a0How narrowly does the enforcement mechanism target infringement?\u00a0 How much will the measure impact lawful expression?\u00a0 How might the measure harm other important rights and interests like user privacy or economic innovation?\u00a0 Ultimately, will the measure\u2019s effectiveness be worth its unintended consequences?\u00a0 What precedent will the measure set for other, more restrictive countries?\u00a0 The answers will reveal whether an IP enforcement proposal appropriately promotes both intellectual property rights and the human rights of users, and not one at the expense of the other.<\/p>\n

To maintain American credibility on Internet freedom, Congress must strive to craft effective IP enforcement measures in a way that does not unduly harm freedom of expression, privacy, and innovation online.\u00a0 Doing so requires a sober assessment of the questions above, comparing the actual benefits against the costs to human rights and other important interests.\u00a0 SOPA and PIPA\u2019s proposed mechanisms fail any such reasonable assessment.<\/p>\n

SOPA would create two mechanisms that would cause broad collateral damage to freedom of expression and privacy: First, it would allow the US government to interfere with \u201cforeign infringing sites,\u201d but the term\u2019s definition is so broad that any non-US site that allows user-generated content could qualify.\u00a0 Once the US government had a court order under this section, it could require ISPs and search engines to prevent access to a site, and compel ad and payment networks to stop doing business with a site. PIPA is narrower in scope, but includes similar remedies, including an obligation for ISPs to filter out requests for certain domain names.\u00a0 As a group of prominent engineers has argued<\/a>, domain-name filtering would have limited effectiveness, sweep in innocent expression, and seriously harm Internet security.<\/p>\n

Separately, SOPA would create a notice-and-cutoff system that allows private parties to starve a website (whether foreign or US-based) of its financial resources.\u00a0 Under this system, if a single rightsholder believes a site does not do enough to monitor and police user infringement, he could send notices to payment and ad networks to stop them from doing business with the site.<\/p>\n

The implications of these mechanisms would be profound.\u00a0 SOPA in particular takes direct aim at user-driven, online communications tools — tools like YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Dropbox that we use everyday to communicate and access information.\u00a0 General-purpose social media sites based outside the US could be tagged as \u201cforeign infringing sites\u201d that could be filtered in the U.S. and stripped of financial support simply for providing a platform for individual expression — even if they had no bad intent and are used largely for innocent expression.<\/p>\n

And to protect themselves from the whims of an aggressive rightsholder under the notice-and-cutoff system, every user-generated content platform, social media website, or cloud-based storage service — anywhere in the world — would have to monitor and police the behavior of users, with severe impact on user privacy and expression.<\/p>\n

Finally, SOPA and PIPA could have sweeping impact beyond US borders.\u00a0 First, because SOPA\u2019s broad reach would encompass legitimate platforms for expression, it could directly impact the work of human rights defenders and democracy activists everywhere.\u00a0 We have seen the power of social media to enable grassroots social movements in the Arab world.\u00a0 If these tools of social change get caught in SOPA\u2019s crosshairs, it could hurt their ability to remain open platforms for expression and organisation.<\/p>\n

More broadly, these bills stand for the proposition that online communications tools and the domain name system should be used as points of control to enforce local laws.\u00a0 Nothing limits the use of such mechanisms to merely the enforcement of intellectual property.\u00a0 If SOPA and PIPA are enacted, the US government must be prepared for other governments to follow suit, in service to whatever social policies they believe are important — whether restricting hate speech, insults to public officials, or political dissent.<\/p>\n

If many other countries adopt these mechanisms, we risk further Balkanisation of the Internet, undermining its benefits as a global platform for expression, democratic engagement, and economic development.\u00a0 This result is difficult to square with the US\u2019s stated foreign policy of supporting a single, global network. The US cannot effectively urge other governments to stop blocking Internet content that violates local laws when the US is supporting precisely the same mechanisms in service of IP enforcement.<\/p>\n

These unintended consequences for human rights and the global Internet must be fully weighed as Congress considers current proposals.\u00a0 While there is no inherent contradiction between IP enforcement and human rights, Congress must ask whether the \u201chow\u201d of these bills truly supports both IP enforcement and human rights.<\/p>\n

Cynthia M Wong is director of the\u00a0Project on Global Internet Freedom at the\u00a0Center for Democracy & Technology<\/a> in Washington, DC. You can follow her on Twitter: @cynthiamw<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Index on Censorship has written to the US Committee on the Judiciary in opposition of the Stop Online Privacy Act. Read the letter here.<\/a><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As debates continue around the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Cynthia M Wong<\/strong> argues that policy makers must look more closely at whether the bill truly supports free expression<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[744,581],"tags":[3989,3003,3988,7403],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29460"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29460"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88592,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29460\/revisions\/88592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}