9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 [Aaron Swartz] So, for me, it all started with a phone call. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It was September, not last year, but the year before that, September 2010, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and I got a phone call from my friend Peter. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "Aaron," he said, "there is an amazing bill that you have to take a look at." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "What is it?" I said. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "It's called COICA, the Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "Peter," I said, "I don't care about copyright law. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "Maybe you're right, maybe Hollywood is right, but either way, what's the big deal? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "I'm not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "Health care, financial reform, those are the issues that I work on. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "Not something obscure, like copyright law." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I could hear Peter grumbling in the background: 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "Look, I don't have time to argue with you," he said. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "But it doesn't matter for right now, because this isn't a bill about copyright." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 "It's not?"[br]"No," he said "It's a bill about the freedom to connect." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now I was listening. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Peter explained what you've probably long since learned, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that this bill would let the government devise a list of websites 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that Americans weren't allowed to visit. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 On the next day, I came up with lots of ways to try to explain this to people. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I said it was the great firewall of America, I said it was an internet black list, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I said it was online censorship. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But I think it's worth taking a step back, putting aside all the rhetoric, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and just thinking for a moment about how radical this bill really was. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Sure, there are lots of times when the government makes rules about speech. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 If you slander a private figure; if you buy a television ad that lies to people; 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 if you have a wild party that plays booming music all night. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 In all these cases, the government can come and stop you. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But this was something radically different. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It wasn't that the government went to people and asked them to take down 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 a particular material that was illegal. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It shut down whole websites. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Essentially, it stopped Americans from communicating entirely with certain groups. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There's nothing really like it in US law. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 If you play loud music all night, the government doesn't slap you with an order 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 requiring you be mute for the next couple of weeks. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They don't say nobody can make anymore noise inside their house. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There's a specific complaint, which they ask you to specifically remedy, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and then your life goes on. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The closest example I could find was a case where the government was at war with an adult bookstore. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The place kept selling pornography, the government kept getting the porn declared illegal, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and then, frustrated, they decided to shut the whole bookstore down. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But even that was eventually declared unconstitutional, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 a violation of the First Amendment. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, you might say, "Surely, COICA would get declared unconstitutional as well." 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But I knew that the Supreme Court had a blind spot around the First Amendment. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 More than anything else, more than slander, or libel, more than pornography, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 more even than child pornography, their blind spot was copyright. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 When it came to copyright, it was like the power of the justices' brain shut off 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You got the sense that deep down, they didn't even think that the First Amendment applied, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 when copyright was an issue. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Which means that if you did want to censor the internet, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 if you wanted to come up with some way 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 that the government could shut down access to particular websites, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 this bill might be the only way to do it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 If it was about pornography, it probably would get overturned by the courts, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 just like in the old bookstore case. (?) 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But if you claimed it was about copyright, it might just sneak through. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And that was especially terrifying, because as you know, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 copyright is everywhere. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 If you want to shut down Wikileaks, it's a bit of a stretch to claim that you're doing it 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because they have too much pornography, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but it's not hard at all to claim that Wikileaks is violating copyright. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because everything is copyright. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 This speech, you know, the thing I'm giving right now, these words are copyrighted. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And it's so easy to accidentally copy something. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, if even Orrin Hatch's Senate website was found to be violating copyright law, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 what's the chance that they wouldn't find something they could pin on any of us? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the internet 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 in terms of traditional things that the law understands. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Is reloading a web page over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 or a violent smashing of shop windows? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 or like the freedom to murder? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 This bill would be potentially a huge, permanent loss. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the internet, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 it would be a change to the Bill of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And freedoms our country had been built on would be suddenly deleted. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 would have snuffed out fundamental rights we'd always taken for granted. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And I realized that, talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But it was going to happen. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The Bill COICA was introduced on September 20th, 2010, on Monday. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 it was scheduled for vote on September 23rd, just three days later. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And well, of course, there had to be a vote: 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 you can't pass a bill without a vote. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The results of that vote were already a foregone conclusion, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because if you looked at the introduction of the law, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 it wasn't just introduced by one rogue, eccentric member of Congress, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 it was introduced by the Chair of the Judiciary Committee 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and co-sponsored by nearly all the other members, Republicans and Democrats. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So yes, there'd be a vote, but it wouldn't be much of a surprise. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the bill, before it was even introduced. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now, I can't stress how unusual this is. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 This is emphatically not how Congress works. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I'm not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on "Schoolhouse Rock!" 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I mean this is not the way that Congress actually works. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I mean, I think we all know Congress is a dead zone of deadlocks and dysfunctions. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There are months of debates and horse-trading and hearings and stall tactics. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I mean, you know, first you are supposed to announce that you are going to hold hearings on a problem, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and then, days of experts talking about the issue, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and then you propose a possible solution, you bring the experts back, get their thought on that, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and then other members have got different solutions and they propose those, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and you spend a bunch (?) of time debating, there's a bunch of trading, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 you get members over to your cause and finally you spend hours talking one on one 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 with the different people in the debate, trying to come back with some sort of compromise, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 which you hash out in endless back room meetings. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And then, when that's all done, you take that, you go through it line by line in public, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to see if anyone has any objections or wants to make any changes. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And then you have the vote. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's a painful, arduous process: you don't just introduce a bill on Monday 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and then pass it unanimously a couple of days later. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That just doesn't happen in Congress. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But this time, it was going to happen. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And it wasn't because there were no disagreements on the issue. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There are always disagreements. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Some Senators thought that the Bill was much too weak and needed to be stronger. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 As it was introduced, the Bill only allowed the Government to shut down web sites. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 These Senators, they wanted any company in the world to have the power to get a web site shut down. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Other Senators thought it was a drop too strong. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But somehow, in a kind of thing you'd never seen in Washington, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 they'd all managed to put their personal differences aside, to come together 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and support one bill they were persuaded they could all live with - 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 a bill that would censor the internet. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And when I saw this, I realized: "Whoever is behind this is good!" 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now the typical way you make good things happen in Washington 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is you find a bunch of wealty companieswho agree with you. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Social Security didn't get passed because some brave politicians decided their good conscience 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 couldn't possibly let old people die starving in the streets. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 ....... Social Security got passed because John D. Rockefeller got sick of having money out of his profits 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 to pay for his workers' pension funds. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now, my point is not that Social Security is a bad thing. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I think it's fantastic. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's just that the way you get the government to do fantastic things 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 is you find a big company willing to back them. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The problem is, of course, that big companies aren't really huge fans of civil liberties. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You know, it's not that they're against them, it's just that there's not much money in it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now, if you've been reading the press, you probably didn't hear this part of the story, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 as Hollywood has been telling it: 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 the great good copyright bill they were pushing was stopped by the evil internet companies, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 who make millions of dollars off of copyright infringement. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But it is - it really wasn't true. (8:52)