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[Aaron Swartz] So, for me, it all started with a phone call.

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It was September, not last year, but the year before that, September 2010,

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and I got a phone call from my friend Peter.

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"Aaron," he said, "there is an amazing bill that you have to take a look at."

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"What is it?" I said.

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"It's called COICA, the Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act."

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"Peter," I said, "I don't care about copyright law.

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"Maybe you're right, maybe Hollywood is right, but either way, what's the big deal?

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"I'm not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright.

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"Health care, financial reform, those are the issues that I work on.

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"Not something obscure, like copyright law."

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I could hear Peter grumbling in the background:

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"Look, I don't have time to argue with you," he said.

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"But it doesn't matter for right now, because this isn't a bill about copyright."

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"It's not?"
"No," he said "It's a bill about the freedom to connect."

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Now I was listening.

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Peter explained what you've probably long since learned,

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that this bill would let the government devise a list of websites

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that Americans weren't allowed to visit.

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On the next day, I came up with lots of ways to try to explain this to people.

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I said it was the great firewall of America, I said it was an internet black list,

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I said it was online censorship.

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But I think it's worth taking a step back, putting aside all the rhetoric,

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and just thinking for a moment about how radical this bill really was.

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Sure, there are lots of times when the government makes rules about speech.

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If you slander a private figure; if you buy a television ad that lies to people;

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if you have a wild party that plays booming music all night.

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In all these cases, the government can come and stop you.

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But this was something radically different.

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It wasn't that the government went to people and asked them to take down

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a particular material that was illegal.

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It shut down whole websites.

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Essentially, it stopped Americans from communicating entirely with certain groups.

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There's nothing really like it in US law.

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If you play loud music all night, the government doesn't slap you with an order

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requiring you be mute for the next couple of weeks.

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They don't say nobody can make anymore noise inside their house.

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There's a specific complaint, which they ask you to specifically remedy,

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and then your life goes on.

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The closest example I could find was a case where the government was at war with an adult bookstore.

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The place kept selling pornography, the government kept getting the porn declared illegal,

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and then, frustrated, they decided to shut the whole bookstore down.

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But even that was eventually declared unconstitutional,

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a violation of the First Amendment.

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So, you might say, "Surely, COICA would get declared unconstitutional as well."

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But I knew that the Supreme Court had a blind spot around the First Amendment.

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More than anything else, more than slander, or libel, more than pornography,

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more even than child pornography, their blind spot was copyright.

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When it came to copyright, it was like the power of the justices' brain shut off

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and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment.

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You got the sense that deep down, they didn't even think that the First Amendment applied,

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when copyright was an issue.

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Which means that if you did want to censor the internet,

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if you wanted to come up with some way

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that the government could shut down access to particular websites,

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this bill might be the only way to do it.

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If it was about pornography, it probably would get overturned by the courts,

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just like in the old bookstore case. (?)

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But if you claimed it was about copyright, it might just sneak through.

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And that was especially terrifying, because as you know,

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copyright is everywhere.

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If you want to shut down Wikileaks, it's a bit of a stretch to claim that you're doing it

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because they have too much pornography,

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but it's not hard at all to claim that Wikileaks is violating copyright.

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Because everything is copyright.

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This speech, you know, the thing I'm giving right now, these words are copyrighted.

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And it's so easy to accidentally copy something.

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So easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch,

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had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website.

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So, if even Orrin Hatch's Senate website was found to be violating copyright law,

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what's the chance that they wouldn't find something they could pin on any of us?

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There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the internet

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in terms of traditional things that the law understands.

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Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store

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or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend?

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Is reloading a web page over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in

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or a violent smashing of shop windows?

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Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech

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or like the freedom to murder?

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This bill would be potentially a huge, permanent loss.

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If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the internet,

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it would be a change to the Bill of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution.

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And freedoms our country had been built on would be suddenly deleted.

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New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom,

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would have snuffed out fundamental rights we'd always taken for granted.

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And I realized that, talking to Peter, that I couldn't let that happen.

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But it was going to happen.

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The Bill COICA was introduced on September 20th, 2010, on Monday.

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And in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom,

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it was scheduled for vote on September 23rd, just three days later.

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And well, of course, there had to be a vote:

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you can't pass a bill without a vote.

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The results of that vote were already a foregone conclusion,

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because if you looked at the introduction of the law,

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it wasn't just introduced by one rogue, eccentric member of Congress,

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it was introduced by the Chair of the Judiciary Committee

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and co-sponsored by nearly all the other members, Republicans and Democrats.

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So yes, there'd be a vote, but it wouldn't be much of a surprise.

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Because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the bill, before it was even introduced.

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Now, I can't stress how unusual this is.

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This is emphatically not how Congress works.

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I'm not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on "Schoolhouse Rock!"

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I mean this is not the way that Congress actually works.

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I mean, I think we all know Congress is a dead zone of deadlocks and dysfunctions.

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There are months of debates and horse-trading and hearings and stall tactics.

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I mean, you know, first you are supposed to announce that you are going to hold hearings on a problem,

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and then, days of experts talking about the issue,

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and then you propose a possible solution, you bring the experts back, get their thought on that,

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and then other members have got different solutions and they propose those,

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and you spend a bunch (?) of time debating, there's a bunch of trading,

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you get members over to your cause and finally you spend hours talking one on one

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with the different people in the debate, trying to come back with some sort of compromise,

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which you hash out in endless back room meetings.

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And then, when that's all done, you take that, you go through it line by line in public,

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to see if anyone has any objections or wants to make any changes.

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And then you have the vote.

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It's a painful, arduous process: you don't just introduce a bill on Monday

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and then pass it unanimously a couple of days later.

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That just doesn't happen in Congress.

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But this time, it was going to happen.

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And it wasn't because there were no disagreements on the issue.

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There are always disagreements.

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Some Senators thought that the Bill was much too weak and needed to be stronger.

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As it was introduced, the Bill only allowed the Government to shut down web sites.

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These Senators, they wanted any company in the world to have the power to get a web site shut down.

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Other Senators thought it was a drop too strong.

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But somehow, in a kind of thing you'd never seen in Washington,

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they'd all managed to put their personal differences aside, to come together

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and support one bill they were persuaded they could all live with -

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a bill that would censor the internet.

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And when I saw this, I realized: "Whoever is behind this is good!"

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Now the typical way you make good things happen in Washington

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is you find a bunch of wealty companieswho agree with you.

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Social Security didn't get passed because some brave politicians decided their good conscience

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couldn't possibly let old people die starving in the streets.

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....... Social Security got passed because John D. Rockefeller got sick of having money out of his profits

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to pay for his workers' pension funds.

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Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers?

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Now, my point is not that Social Security is a bad thing.

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I think it's fantastic.

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It's just that the way you get the government to do fantastic things

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is you find a big company willing to back them.

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The problem is, of course, that big companies aren't really huge fans of civil liberties.

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You know, it's not that they're against them, it's just that there's not much money in it.

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Now, if you've been reading the press, you probably didn't hear this part of the story,

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as Hollywood has been telling it:

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the great good copyright bill they were pushing was stopped by the evil internet companies,

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who make millions of dollars off of copyright infringement.

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But it is - it really wasn't true. (8:52)