January 19, 2012 11:13 PM UTC

The SOPA/PIPA Blackout: This Mattered

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• by: Colorado Pols

Our friends at the Washington Post report:

An online protest led by Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. against U.S. anti-piracy bills illustrates how Internet companies are changing legislative debate in Washington.

Nine co-sponsors, five in the Senate and four House members, began withdrawing their support for Hollywood-backed measures to combat piracy. Internet companies devoted home pages yesterday to opposing the bills, threatening a traditional lobbying effort led by the Motion Picture Association of America that assembled bipartisan support for the legislation…

“It’s unprecedented,” Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard University professor of law and computer science who serves on the boards of bill opponents Electronic Frontier Foundation and Internet Society, said in an interview. “You could see some members of Congress saying there’s no percentage in it for me to stick out my neck on something like this.”

In Colorado, Sen. Michael Bennet, a former co-sponsor of the Senate version of the bill called the PROTECT IP Act, backed away yesterday citing “valid concerns” raised locally–FOX 31:

Bennet, a Democrat, was one of 40 co-sponsors for the “Protect Intellectual Property Act”, which is being pushed by Hollywood’s music and film industries in an effort to crack down on internet piracy and copyright infringement.

But, on Wednesday, as protests swirled through cyberspace, Bennet told FOX 31 he’s going to push Congress to take a more balanced approach…

“This is an important jobs issue,” Bennet said. “Recently, several Coloradans have raised valid concerns about potential unintended consequences that could result from the bill as it is currently written and that could compromise our economic growth.”

Several Republican legislators, including Rep. Scott Tipton, Doug Lamborn, and Mike Coffman also announced opposition to SOPA yesterday, positions that we believe were not public knowledge prior to yesterday’s protest (assuming they had taken positions at all). Rep. Jared Polis has led the opposition to these bills in a truly national sense, and deserves credit now that his opinion is growing in come-lately popularity among his fellow representatives.

Within what we do consider to be a very effective use of our platform yesterday to add our voice to a much larger expression of dissent, we feel obligated to correct one piece of inaccurate reporting about our involvement–or at least place it in its proper context. The Grand Junction Sentinel’s Charles Ashby reported today on local websites involved in the SOPA blackout:

Most notable among political followers in the state was the decision by ColoradoPols.com to link to a national website, sopastrike.com/strike, instead of posting its usual fare.

Although ColoradoPols.com does post original content, it’s primarily known as an aggregate site, one that routinely links to copyrighted news articles produced by newspapers around the state. Last year, the Denver Post threatened legal action against the website as a result.

Folks, this isn’t an accurate characterization of the actions taken by the Denver Post against this blog in 2010 (not last year, there’s the first correction), or our motivation for joining in the SOPA blackout. To briefly recap for those not aware, in May of 2010, a group of Colorado newspapers led by the Denver Post demanded that this blog stop quoting any material from their publications–a demand in excess of their legal rights, and impinging on our own legitimate fair use rights. We have nevertheless complied with this demand in the interest of avoiding costly litigation. Note that the Grand Junction Sentinel didn’t participate in these threats, and we appreciate being able to cite non-paywalled content from them.

Because no media outlet has a monopoly on information, we haven’t suffered from this misguided decision, although we regret being unable to properly acknowledge and promote excellent journalism still produced at the Post and elsewhere. But while there are convergent themes in the Post’s unlawful demands on us and the battle in Congress over SOPA/PIPA, their legal bullying is not the reason we chose to get involved with yesterday’s protest action.

We participated because SOPA/PIPA represent a much greater threat to online forums like this one than any newspaper, even those like the Denver Post who engaged in such unscrupulous “protection” of their copyrights as the ill-fated Righthaven. It’s one thing to demand we do something with legal enforceabililty–quite another to be blocked by legally immunized ISPs and search engines. Combine that with the loss of “safe harbor” provisions giving websites a fair opportunity to remove offending content, and we’re talking about a mortal threat.

But with SOPA/PIPA in disarray, and this blog more popular than ever after a year and a half of impasse with misguided, declining local newspapers, maybe these are fights we’re winning.