Internet Bill SOPA Was Introduced By Republicans. SOPA is a Clear Attack on the First Amendment.

Internet Bill SOPA Was Introduced By Republicans. SOPA is a Clear Attack on the First Amendment. Why Do Republicans Hate America?

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard Law School, argues the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) violates the First Amendment in a memo sent to members of Congress on Thursday.

The bill would empower the Justice Department and copyright holders to demand that search engines, Internet providers and payment processors cut ties with websites "dedicated" to copyright infringement.

Tribe argues the bill amounts to illegal "prior restraint" because it would suppress speech without a judicial hearing.

Additionally, the law's definition of a rogue website is unconstitutionally vague, Tribe writes.

"Conceivably, an entire website containing tens of thousands of pages could be targeted if only a single page were accused of infringement," Tribe writes. "Such an approach would create severe practical problems for sites with substantial user-generated content, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and for blogs that allow users to post videos, photos, and other materials."

He argues SOPA undermines the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which protected websites from being held responsible for the actions of their users. 

The bill would "effectively require sites actively to police themselves to ensure that infringement does not occur," he writes.

Tribe concludes the result is that the law would chill protected and lawful speech.

"The threat of such a cutoff would deter Internet companies from adopting innovative approaches to hosting and linking to third party content and from exploring new kinds of communication," he writes.

In a footnote, Tribe acknowledges that he was hired by the Consumer Electronics Association, which is lobbying against SOPA, but he adds, "The views expressed in this paper represent my own views as a scholar and student of the Constitution."

A spokeswoman for the House Judiciary Committee Republicans pointed to a competing legal analysis by constitutional law expert Floyd Abrams.

 The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R.3261, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors. The bill expands the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.[2] Now before the House Judiciary Committee, it builds on the similar PRO-IP Act of 2008 and the corresponding Senate bill, the Protect IP Act.[3]

"In addition to domain-name filtering, SOPA would impose an open-ended obligation on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to prevent access to infringing sites...Preventing access to specific sites would require ISPs to inspect all the Internet traffic of its entire user base—the kind of privacy-invasive monitoring that has come under fire in the context of 'deep packet inspection' for advertising purposes", said Center for Democracy and Technology lawyers David Sohn and Andrew McDiarmid in an article written for The Atlantic.[33]

"Is this really what we want to do to the internet? Shut it down every time it doesn't fit someone's business model?" asks Harvard Business Review blogger James Allworth, concluding that the bill would "give America its very own version of the Great Firewall of China."[44]

The legislation would lead to many cloud computing and Web hosting services moving out of the U.S. to avoid lawsuits, predicted Christian Dawson, COO of Virginia-based hosting company ServInt. "I see SOPA as a stimulus package for Asia and Europe and their Internet economies," he said.[45]

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