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Authors: Aaron Swartz
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websites. Essentially, it stopped Americans from communicating entirely with certain groups. Thereâs nothing really like it in U.S. law. If you play loud music all night, the government doesnât slap you with an order requiring you be mute for the next couple weeks. They donât say nobody can make any more noise inside your house. Thereâs a specific complaint, which they ask you to specifically remedy, and then your life goes on.
The closest example I could find was a case where the government was at war with an adult bookstore. The place kept selling pornography; the government kept getting the porn declared illegal. And then, frustrated, they decided to shut the whole bookstore down. But even that was eventually declared unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment.
So, you might say, surely COICA would get declared unconstitutional as well. But I knew that the Supreme Court had a blind spot around the First Amendment, more than anything else, more than slander or libel, more than pornography, more even than child pornography. Their blind spot was copyright. When it came to copyright, it was like the part of the justicesâ brains shut off, and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment. You got the sense that, deep down, they didnât even think the First Amendment applied when copyright was at issue, which means that if you did want to censor the Internet, if you wanted to come up with some way that the government could shut down access to particular websites, this bill might be the only way to do it. If it was about pornography, it probably would get overturned by courts, just like the adult bookstore case. But if you claimed it was about copyright, it might just sneak through.
And that was especially terrifying, because, as you know, because copyright is everywhere. If you want to shut down WikiLeaks, itâs a bit of a stretch to claim that youâre doing it because they have too much pornography, but itâs not hard at all to claim that WikiLeaks is violating copyright, because everything is copyrighted. This speech, you know, the thing Iâm giving right now, these words arecopyrighted. And itâs so easy to accidentally copy something, so easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website. So if even Orrin Hatchâs Senate website was found to be violating copyright law, whatâs the chance that they wouldnât find something they could pin on any of us?
Thereâs a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?
This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent, loss. If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the Bill of Rights. The freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on, would be suddenly deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we had always taken for granted. And I realized that day, talking to Peter, that I couldnât let that happen.
But it was going to happen. The bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20th, 2010, a Monday, and in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom, it was scheduled for a vote on September 23rd, just three days later. And while, of course, there had to be a voteâyou canât pass a bill without a voteâthe results of that vote were already a foregone conclusion, because if you looked at the introduction of the law, it
The closest example I could find was a case where the government was at war with an adult bookstore. The place kept selling pornography; the government kept getting the porn declared illegal. And then, frustrated, they decided to shut the whole bookstore down. But even that was eventually declared unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment.
So, you might say, surely COICA would get declared unconstitutional as well. But I knew that the Supreme Court had a blind spot around the First Amendment, more than anything else, more than slander or libel, more than pornography, more even than child pornography. Their blind spot was copyright. When it came to copyright, it was like the part of the justicesâ brains shut off, and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment. You got the sense that, deep down, they didnât even think the First Amendment applied when copyright was at issue, which means that if you did want to censor the Internet, if you wanted to come up with some way that the government could shut down access to particular websites, this bill might be the only way to do it. If it was about pornography, it probably would get overturned by courts, just like the adult bookstore case. But if you claimed it was about copyright, it might just sneak through.
And that was especially terrifying, because, as you know, because copyright is everywhere. If you want to shut down WikiLeaks, itâs a bit of a stretch to claim that youâre doing it because they have too much pornography, but itâs not hard at all to claim that WikiLeaks is violating copyright, because everything is copyrighted. This speech, you know, the thing Iâm giving right now, these words arecopyrighted. And itâs so easy to accidentally copy something, so easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website. So if even Orrin Hatchâs Senate website was found to be violating copyright law, whatâs the chance that they wouldnât find something they could pin on any of us?
Thereâs a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?
This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent, loss. If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the Bill of Rights. The freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on, would be suddenly deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we had always taken for granted. And I realized that day, talking to Peter, that I couldnât let that happen.
But it was going to happen. The bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20th, 2010, a Monday, and in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom, it was scheduled for a vote on September 23rd, just three days later. And while, of course, there had to be a voteâyou canât pass a bill without a voteâthe results of that vote were already a foregone conclusion, because if you looked at the introduction of the law, it
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