Internet activists take aim at legislators pushing SOPA

Rich Fiscus
29 Dec 2011 21:36

Now that their campaign against GoDaddy has convinced the world's largest domain registrar to back away from supporting SOPA, some Reddit members are turning their attention to unseating legislators whose support is keeping the bill alive.
To be sure, this effort is on an entirely different level than boycotting an Internet registrar, but Reddit's previous effort surely garnered them plenty of extra attention.
In part that can be attributed to their GoDaddy protest getting significant coverage outside the tech world, in mainstream publications like USA Today, Forbes, and Time. That isn't the only reason GoDaddy is in the news either.
The Hollywood Reporter has an article about a lawsuit in which GoDaddy is accused of facilitating trademark infringement by AMPAS (the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences) because of infringing domain names owned by customers of their domain parking service.
Keep in mind, GoDaddy does not own the domain names. They merely provide a service to park domains and provide ads. The point is, the claim that IP holders only want SOPA to target the actual bad actors is already proven false.
They are going after service providers without it. And what's worse, GoDaddy knows this and still decided to support the bill.
But perhaps that's not so surprising thanks to a provision added to SOPA when the bill was amended recently. When the power for copyright holders to go after US companies was removed, another one to give DNS providers, search engines, payment processors, and ad providers the right to take action without a court order, or even a complaint from an IP holder.
This is actually more than an IP holder could demand with a takedown request, but without all that pesky due process. All that is required is:

the reasonable belief that--
(1) the Internet site is a foreign infringing site or is an Internet site dedicated to theft of U.S. property; and
(2) the action is consistent with the entity's terms of service or other contractual rights.

Of course we already have a definition for reasonable belief. It has been conveniently provided by the agreement between the MPAA, RIAA and a group of ISPs for their five strikes plan to kick subscribers accused of copyright infringement off the Internet.
That standard is nothing more or less than "the IP holder says so." As with that agreement, it's not important whether all these parties want to cooperate. Rather, it is about what kind of carrot or stick they can come up with.
The worst part is they wouldn't need to convince everyone. Just like in the previous agreement, ISPs are the low hanging fruit. If they won't be swayed by threats, and some of them probably will, there are always offers of content deals. After all, why should they care about blocking a website which probably doesn't even belong to one of the customers?
Once they get the ISPs to cooperate, search engines, payment processors and ad networks just aren't that important. Why worry if someone can see a website exists if they can't reach it. Obviously simple DNS blocking could be bypassed, but as long as the ISPs are playing ball there's no reason for the IP holders not to help pay for more advanced measures.
Not surprisingly, Redditors aren't the only denizens of the web trying to organize against SOPA supporters in Congress. Influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com recently vowed to "do everything in his power" to defeat Republican in the House Of Representatives who continues to support SOPA.
He went further to suggest an alliance with activists for the Democratic Party, whom he disagrees with on practically everything, to keep the effort as bipartisan as the support for SOPA in Congress:

Everyone on the left and right who is interested should pledge $10.00 per candidate, or $321.00. If that?s too much, just pledge $10.00.
A fund should be created and the left should go out and find candidates to take on the Democrat sponsors. The right should go out and find candidates to take on the Republican sponsors. Heck, maybe Act Blue would let us on the right come by and we can all use their pre-existing platform (a platform no one on the right has even been able to really compete with. Seriously, I?m a big admirer).
The money should then be used to fund the primary challenges against the incumbent sponsors of SOPA. Let the right vet and direct the funding on the right so no one thinks the left is trying to pick the challenger and vice-versa on the left.
This might mean some allies are taken out. It might mean we take out Marsha Blackburn on the right and Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the left.
But sometimes a fight is that important. Killing SOPA is that important. Letting the Attorney General of the United States shut down the internet as he wants, whether it be Eric Holder or a future John Ashcroft, should scare the mess out of every American.
Congress has proven it does not understand the internet. Perhaps they will understand brute strength against them at the ballot box.
If members of Congress do not pull their name from co-sponsorship of SOPA, the left and right should pledge to defeat each and every one of them.