Human Rights Organizations Against PIPA: Letter to Senator Harry Reid
At the NY Tech Meetup Wednesday, I spoke with Mike Rispoli, Campaign and Media Strategist from Access. We discussed how many Human Rights organizations globally are in solidarity with Tech companies in NYC and nationwide. This is the letter from Human Rights organizations that was sent to Majority Leader Harry Reid that Rispoli handed to me. The complete letter is online at Access.
When you read it, you will see that it is a clearly delineated and informative representation of what the impact of the legislation on small businesses and global enterprises will be. It enumerates how passage of PIPA will erode the reputation of the US as a leader of freedom and democracy by "institutionalizing the use of internet censorship tools to enforce domestic law in the United States," thereby creating "a paradox that undermines it moral authority to criticize repressive regimes." (China, Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Syria which use DNS filtering to silence their citizens)
It identifies what DNS filtering is, the means the legislation intends to use, and shows how that means is "ineffective and easy to circumvent, while causing collateral damage to online communities on a massive scale." It cites examples of such damage, like when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency seized the domain mooo.com (see http://boingboing.net/2011/02/17/dhs-erroneously-seiz.html) and it warns that once the technical infrastructure of censorship is secured, future governments/private companies will be able to "block any type of content on the web." Such overreaching power in the hands of the wrong group can be used to extend their power and domination unchecked.
The letter specifies how global companies and their websites, at the risk of "losing access to advertising services, payment providers, search engine listings and their domain name" will be driven away unable to "use U.S. services as a hedge against legal threats," while missing what the legislation is supposed to be for, large-scale commercial infringement.
The letter discusses the "double jurisdiction problem," so that non U.S. based sites will have to formulate whether a site is legal in both the country it is operating in and the U.S. What if a site is legal in its home country and illegal in the U.S.? And it highlights how a definition as seemingly simplistic as "information location service" is so incredibly broad as to make "nearly every U.S. based actor on the internet, like blogs, chat rooms, social networks and users, potentially subject to enforcement orders of PIPA." And the regulation that the service providers act ASAP to remove the infringer, places the burden on the linking service who will be forced to act to avoid litigation. And if the site is found to be innocent after all? It's links will have disappeared from the web. Costly for all the players? Absolutely! But the lawyers, court reporters and anyone in the justice system will do very, very well.
Continued on the next page
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