WEBVTT 00:00:01.120 --> 00:00:07.140 AARON SWARTZ: So, for me, it all started with a phone call. It was September—not last 00:00:07.140 --> 00:00:11.620 year, but the year before that, September 2010. And I got a phone call from my friend 00:00:11.620 --> 00:00:18.020 Peter. "Aaron," he said, "there’s an amazing bill that you have to take a look at." "What 00:00:18.020 --> 00:00:24.680 is it?" I said. "It’s called COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeiting 00:00:24.680 --> 00:00:29.770 Act." "But, Peter," I said, "I don’t care about copyright law. Maybe you’re right. 00:00:29.770 --> 00:00:33.219 Maybe Hollywood is right. But either way, what’s the big deal? I’m not going to 00:00:33.219 --> 00:00:38.339 waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Healthcare, financial reform—those 00:00:38.339 --> 00:00:44.160 are the issues that I work on, not something obscure like copyright law." I could hear 00:00:44.160 --> 00:00:48.879 Peter grumbling in the background. "Look, I don’t have time to argue with you," he 00:00:48.879 --> 00:00:53.440 said, "but it doesn’t matter for right now, because this isn’t a bill about copyright." 00:00:53.440 --> 00:01:00.440 "It’s not?" "No," he said. "It’s a bill about the freedom to connect." Now I was listening. 00:01:02.039 --> 00:01:05.230 Peter explained what you’ve all probably long since learned, that this bill would let 00:01:05.230 --> 00:01:10.260 the government devise a list of websites that Americans weren’t allowed to visit. On the 00:01:10.260 --> 00:01:14.580 next day, I came up with lots of ways to try to explain this to people. I said it was a 00:01:14.580 --> 00:01:19.800 great firewall of America. I said it was an Internet black list. I said it was online 00:01:19.800 --> 00:01:24.810 censorship. But I think it’s worth taking a step back, putting aside all the rhetoric 00:01:24.810 --> 00:01:30.200 and just thinking for a moment about how radical this bill really was. Sure, there are lots 00:01:30.200 --> 00:01:35.010 of times when the government makes rules about speech. If you slander a private figure, if 00:01:35.010 --> 00:01:39.920 you buy a television ad that lies to people, if you have a wild party that plays booming 00:01:39.920 --> 00:01:45.360 music all night, in all these cases, the government can come stop you. But this was something 00:01:45.360 --> 00:01:49.370 radically different. It wasn’t the government went to people and asked them to take down 00:01:49.370 --> 00:01:54.650 particular material that was illegal; it shut down whole websites. Essentially, it stopped 00:01:54.650 --> 00:02:00.320 Americans from communicating entirely with certain groups. There’s nothing really like 00:02:00.320 --> 00:02:04.320 it in U.S. law. If you play loud music all night, the government doesn’t slap you with 00:02:04.320 --> 00:02:08.950 an order requiring you be mute for the next couple weeks. They don’t say nobody can 00:02:08.950 --> 00:02:13.700 make any more noise inside your house. There’s a specific complaint, which they ask you to 00:02:13.700 --> 00:02:18.260 specifically remedy, and then your life goes on. 00:02:18.260 --> 00:02:22.049 The closest example I could find was a case where the government was at war with an adult 00:02:22.049 --> 00:02:26.069 bookstore. The place kept selling pornography; the government kept getting the porn declared 00:02:26.069 --> 00:02:30.879 illegal. And then, frustrated, they decided to shut the whole bookstore down. But even 00:02:30.879 --> 00:02:36.150 that was eventually declared unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment. 00:02:36.150 --> 00:02:42.060 So, you might say, surely COICA would get declared unconstitutional, as well. But I 00:02:42.060 --> 00:02:46.980 knew that the Supreme Court had a blind spot around the First Amendment, more than anything 00:02:46.980 --> 00:02:52.909 else, more than slander or libel, more than pornography, more even than child pornography. 00:02:52.909 --> 00:02:57.400 Their blind spot was copyright. When it came to copyright, it was like the part of the 00:02:57.400 --> 00:03:01.739 justices’ brains shut off, and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment. 00:03:01.739 --> 00:03:05.459 You got the sense that, deep down, they didn’t even think the First Amendment applied when 00:03:05.459 --> 00:03:10.439 copyright was at issue, which means that if you did want to censor the Internet, if you 00:03:10.439 --> 00:03:16.120 wanted to come up with some way that the government could shut down access to particular websites, 00:03:16.120 --> 00:03:20.819 this bill might be the only way to do it. If it was about pornography, it probably would 00:03:20.819 --> 00:03:25.029 get overturned by courts, just like the adult bookstore case. But if you claimed it was 00:03:25.029 --> 00:03:28.069 about copyright, it might just sneak through. 00:03:28.069 --> 00:03:32.060 And that was especially terrifying, because, as you know, because copyright is everywhere. 00:03:32.060 --> 00:03:35.459 If you want to shut down WikiLeaks, it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that you’re 00:03:35.459 --> 00:03:39.779 doing it because they have too much pornography, but it’s not hard at all to claim that WikiLeaks 00:03:39.779 --> 00:03:44.019 is violating copyright, because everything is copyrighted. This speech, you know, the 00:03:44.019 --> 00:03:49.040 thing I’m giving right now, these words are copyrighted. And it’s so easy to accidentally 00:03:49.040 --> 00:03:53.969 copy something, so easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin 00:03:53.969 --> 00:04:00.969 Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website. So if even Orrin 00:04:01.169 --> 00:04:05.840 Hatch’s Senate website was found to be violating copyright law, what’s the chance that they 00:04:05.840 --> 00:04:12.010 wouldn’t find something they could pin on any of us? 00:04:12.010 --> 00:04:17.750 There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet 00:04:17.750 --> 00:04:22.710 in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent 00:04:22.710 --> 00:04:28.460 like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is 00:04:28.460 --> 00:04:33.620 reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing 00:04:33.620 --> 00:04:39.780 of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom 00:04:39.780 --> 00:04:41.979 to murder? 00:04:41.979 --> 00:04:47.430 This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent, loss. If we lost the ability to communicate 00:04:47.430 --> 00:04:52.590 with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the Bill of Rights. The freedoms 00:04:52.590 --> 00:04:56.900 guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on, would be suddenly 00:04:56.900 --> 00:05:02.270 deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out 00:05:02.270 --> 00:05:08.020 fundamental rights we had always taken for granted. And I realized that day, talking 00:05:08.020 --> 00:05:14.490 to Peter, that I couldn’t let that happen. 00:05:14.490 --> 00:05:20.000 But it was going to happen. The bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20th, 2010, a 00:05:20.000 --> 00:05:24.919 Monday, and in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the 00:05:24.919 --> 00:05:31.919 bottom, it was scheduled for a vote on September 23rd, just three days later. And while, of 00:05:32.020 --> 00:05:35.849 course, there had to be a vote—you can’t pass a bill without a vote—the results of 00:05:35.849 --> 00:05:40.050 that vote were already a foregone conclusion, because if you looked at the introduction 00:05:40.050 --> 00:05:45.210 of the law, it wasn’t just introduced by one rogue eccentric member of Congress; it 00:05:45.210 --> 00:05:50.080 was introduced by the chair of the Judiciary Committee and co-sponsored by nearly all the 00:05:50.080 --> 00:05:55.039 other members, Republicans and Democrats. So, yes, there’d be a vote, but it wouldn’t 00:05:55.039 --> 00:05:59.699 be much of a surprise, because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the 00:05:59.699 --> 00:06:01.990 bill before it was even introduced. 00:06:01.990 --> 00:06:07.110 Now, I can’t stress how unusual this is. This is emphatically not how Congress works. 00:06:07.110 --> 00:06:10.389 I’m not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on Schoolhouse Rock. 00:06:10.389 --> 00:06:15.289 I mean, this is not the way Congress actually works. I mean, I think we all know Congress 00:06:15.289 --> 00:06:20.580 is a dead zone of deadlock and dysfunction. There are months of debates and horse trading 00:06:20.580 --> 00:06:24.199 and hearings and stall tactics. I mean, you know, first you’re supposed to announce 00:06:24.199 --> 00:06:28.139 that you’re going to hold hearings on a problem, and then days of experts talking 00:06:28.139 --> 00:06:32.139 about the issue, and then you propose a possible solution, you bring the experts back for their 00:06:32.139 --> 00:06:35.759 thoughts on that, and then other members have different solutions, and they propose those, 00:06:35.759 --> 00:06:39.129 and you spend of bunch of time debating, and there’s a bunch of trading, they get members 00:06:39.129 --> 00:06:43.169 over to your cause. And finally, you spend hours talking one on one with the different 00:06:43.169 --> 00:06:46.919 people in the debate, try and come back with some sort of compromise, which you hash out 00:06:46.919 --> 00:06:50.689 in endless backroom meetings. And then, when that’s all done, you take that, and you 00:06:50.689 --> 00:06:55.259 go through it line by line in public to see if anyone has any objections or wants to make 00:06:55.259 --> 00:07:01.219 any changes. And then you have the vote. It’s a painful, arduous process. You don’t just 00:07:01.219 --> 00:07:05.949 introduce a bill on Monday and then pass it unanimously a couple days later. That just 00:07:05.949 --> 00:07:07.539 doesn’t happen in Congress. 00:07:07.539 --> 00:07:13.229 But this time, it was going to happen. And it wasn’t because there were no disagreements 00:07:13.229 --> 00:07:16.810 on the issue. There are always disagreements. Some senators thought the bill was much too 00:07:16.810 --> 00:07:20.620 weak and needed to be stronger: As it was introduced, the bill only allowed the government 00:07:20.620 --> 00:07:24.340 to shut down websites, and these senators, they wanted any company in the world to have 00:07:24.340 --> 00:07:30.360 the power to get a website shut down. Other senators thought it was a drop too strong. 00:07:30.360 --> 00:07:33.400 But somehow, in the kind of thing you never see in Washington, they had all managed to 00:07:33.400 --> 00:07:38.710 put their personal differences aside to come together and support one bill they were persuaded 00:07:38.710 --> 00:07:45.120 they could all live with: a bill that would censor the Internet. And when I saw this, 00:07:45.120 --> 00:07:50.249 I realized: Whoever was behind this was good. 00:07:50.249 --> 00:07:55.749 Now, the typical way you make good things happen in Washington is you find a bunch of 00:07:55.749 --> 00:07:59.550 wealthy companies who agree with you. Social Security didn’t get passed because some 00:07:59.550 --> 00:08:04.439 brave politicians decided their good conscience couldn’t possibly let old people die starving 00:08:04.439 --> 00:08:08.789 in the streets. I mean, are you kidding me? Social Security got passed because John D. 00:08:08.789 --> 00:08:12.789 Rockefeller was sick of having to take money out of his profits to pay for his workers’ 00:08:12.789 --> 00:08:17.870 pension funds. Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers? 00:08:17.870 --> 00:08:22.370 Now, my point is not that Social Security is a bad thing—I think it’s fantastic. 00:08:22.370 --> 00:08:26.860 It’s just that the way you get the government to do fantastic things is you find a big company 00:08:26.860 --> 00:08:32.669 willing to back them. The problem is, of course, that big companies aren’t really huge fans 00:08:32.669 --> 00:08:36.219 of civil liberties. You know, it’s not that they’re against them; it’s just there’s 00:08:36.219 --> 00:08:38.200 not much money in it. 00:08:38.200 --> 00:08:42.849 Now, if you’ve been reading the press, you probably didn’t hear this part of the story. 00:08:42.849 --> 00:08:46.240 As Hollywood has been telling it, the great, good copyright bill they were pushing was 00:08:46.240 --> 00:08:50.240 stopped by the evil Internet companies who make millions of dollars off of copyright 00:08:50.240 --> 00:08:55.279 infringement. But it just—it really wasn’t true. I mean, I was in there, in the meetings 00:08:55.279 --> 00:09:00.500 with the Internet companies—actually probably all here today. And, you know, if all their 00:09:00.500 --> 00:09:04.420 profits depended on copyright infringement, they would have put a lot more money into 00:09:04.420 --> 00:09:10.200 changing copyright law. The fact is, the big Internet companies, they would do just fine 00:09:10.200 --> 00:09:13.810 if this bill passed. I mean, they wouldn’t be thrilled about it, but I doubt they would 00:09:13.810 --> 00:09:19.380 even have a noticeable dip in their stock price. So they were against it, but they were 00:09:19.380 --> 00:09:23.800 against it, like the rest of us, on grounds primarily of principle. And principle doesn’t 00:09:23.800 --> 00:09:28.800 have a lot of money in the budget to spend on lobbyists. So they were practical about 00:09:28.800 --> 00:09:31.980 it. "Look," they said, "this bill is going to pass. In fact, it’s probably going to 00:09:31.980 --> 00:09:36.709 pass unanimously. As much as we try, this is not a train we’re going to be able to 00:09:36.709 --> 00:09:40.779 stop. So, we’re not going to support it—we couldn’t support it. But in opposition, 00:09:40.779 --> 00:09:45.430 let’s just try and make it better." So that was the strategy: lobby to make the bill better. 00:09:45.430 --> 00:09:49.010 They had lists of changes that would make the bill less obnoxious or less expensive 00:09:49.010 --> 00:09:53.100 for them, or whatever. But the fact remained at the end of the day, it was going to be 00:09:53.100 --> 00:09:56.600 a bill that was going to censor the Internet, and there was nothing we could do to stop 00:09:56.600 --> 00:09:58.959 it. 00:09:58.959 --> 00:10:03.570 So I did what you always do when you’re a little guy facing a terrible future with 00:10:03.570 --> 00:10:10.570 long odds and little hope of success: I started an online petition. I called all my friends, 00:10:12.250 --> 00:10:15.930 and we stayed up all night setting up a website for this new group, Demand Progress, with 00:10:15.930 --> 00:10:22.230 an online petition opposing this noxious bill, and I sent it to a few friends. Now, I’ve 00:10:22.230 --> 00:10:26.040 done a few online petitions before. I’ve worked at some of the biggest groups in the 00:10:26.040 --> 00:10:32.209 world that do online petitions. I’ve written a ton of them and read even more. But I’ve 00:10:32.209 --> 00:10:37.889 never seen anything like this. Starting from literally nothing, we went to 10,000 signers, 00:10:37.889 --> 00:10:44.889 then 100,000 signers, and then 200,000 signers and 300,000 signers, in just a couple of weeks. 00:10:45.050 --> 00:10:48.910 And it wasn’t just signing a name. We asked those people to call Congress, to call urgently. 00:10:48.910 --> 00:10:53.449 There was a vote coming up this week, in just a couple days, and we had to stop it. And 00:10:53.449 --> 00:10:56.980 at the same time, we told the press about it, about this incredible online petition 00:10:56.980 --> 00:11:01.399 that was taking off. And we met with the staff of members of Congress and pleaded with them 00:11:01.399 --> 00:11:04.660 to withdraw their support for the bill. I mean, it was amazing. It was huge. The power 00:11:04.660 --> 00:11:11.420 of the Internet rose up in force against this bill. And then it passed unanimously. 00:11:11.420 --> 00:11:16.560 Now, to be fair, several of the members gave nice speeches before casting their vote, and 00:11:16.560 --> 00:11:20.110 in their speeches they said their office had been overwhelmed with comments about the First 00:11:20.110 --> 00:11:24.630 Amendment concerns behind this bill, comments that had them very worried, so worried, in 00:11:24.630 --> 00:11:29.230 fact, they weren’t sure that they still supported the bill. But even though they didn’t 00:11:29.230 --> 00:11:32.480 support it, they were going to vote for it anyway, they said, because they needed to 00:11:32.480 --> 00:11:37.100 keep the process moving, and they were sure any problems that were had with it could be 00:11:37.100 --> 00:11:42.589 fixed later. So, I’m going to ask you, does this sound like Washington, D.C., to you? 00:11:42.589 --> 00:11:47.120 Since when do members of Congress vote for things that they oppose just to keep the process 00:11:47.120 --> 00:11:53.250 moving? I mean, whoever was behind this was good. 00:11:53.250 --> 00:11:58.870 And then, suddenly, the process stopped. Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon, put a 00:11:58.870 --> 00:12:04.250 hold on the bill. Giving a speech in which he called it a nuclear bunker-buster bomb 00:12:04.250 --> 00:12:08.430 aimed at the Internet, he announced he would not allow it to pass without changes. And 00:12:08.430 --> 00:12:13.800 as you may know, a single senator can’t actually stop a bill by themselves, but they 00:12:13.800 --> 00:12:19.000 can delay it. By objecting to a bill, they can demand Congress spend a bunch of time 00:12:19.000 --> 00:12:24.899 debating it before getting it passed. And Senator Wyden did. He bought us time—a lot 00:12:24.899 --> 00:12:28.060 of time, as it turned out. His delay held all the way through the end of that session 00:12:28.060 --> 00:12:32.050 of Congress, so that when the bill came back, it had to start all over again. And since 00:12:32.050 --> 00:12:35.899 they were starting all over again, they figured, why not give it a new name? And that’s when 00:12:35.899 --> 00:12:39.850 it began being called PIPA, and eventually SOPA. 00:12:39.850 --> 00:12:45.800 So there was probably a year or two of delay there. And in retrospect, we used that time 00:12:45.800 --> 00:12:50.740 to lay the groundwork for what came later. But that’s not what it felt like at the 00:12:50.740 --> 00:12:55.199 time. At the time, it felt like we were going around telling people that these bills were 00:12:55.199 --> 00:13:00.870 awful, and in return, they told us that they thought we were crazy. I mean, we were kids 00:13:00.870 --> 00:13:04.620 wandering around waving our arms about how the government was going to censor the Internet. 00:13:04.620 --> 00:13:09.470 It does sound a little crazy. You can ask Larry tomorrow. I was constantly telling him 00:13:09.470 --> 00:13:13.230 what was going on, trying to get him involved, and I’m pretty sure he just thought I was 00:13:13.230 --> 00:13:20.230 exaggerating. Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period. But when the bill came 00:13:20.509 --> 00:13:24.449 back and started moving again, suddenly all the work we had done started coming together. 00:13:24.449 --> 00:13:28.009 All the folks we talked to about it suddenly began getting really involved and getting 00:13:28.009 --> 00:13:32.420 others involved. Everything started snowballing. It happened so fast. 00:13:32.420 --> 00:13:36.690 I remember there was one week where I was having dinner with a friend in the technology 00:13:36.690 --> 00:13:41.860 industry, and he asked what I worked on, and I told him about this bill. And he said, "Wow! 00:13:41.860 --> 00:13:48.860 You need to tell people about that." And I just groaned. And then, just a few weeks later, 00:13:49.649 --> 00:13:53.100 I remember I was chatting with this cute girl on the subway, and she wasn’t in technology 00:13:53.100 --> 00:13:58.110 at all, but when she heard that I was, she turned to me very seriously and said, "You 00:13:58.110 --> 00:14:05.110 know, we have to stop 'SOAP.'" So, progress, right? 00:14:05.509 --> 00:14:12.509 But, you know, I think that story illustrates what happened during those couple weeks, because 00:14:13.470 --> 00:14:17.690 the reason we won wasn’t because I was working on it or Reddit was working on it or Google 00:14:17.690 --> 00:14:22.509 was working on it or Tumblr or any other particular person. It was because there was this enormous 00:14:22.509 --> 00:14:28.980 mental shift in our industry. Everyone was thinking of ways they could help, often really 00:14:28.980 --> 00:14:33.440 clever, ingenious ways. People made videos. They made infographics. They started PACs. 00:14:33.440 --> 00:14:38.250 They designed ads. They bought billboards. They wrote news stories. They held meetings. 00:14:38.250 --> 00:14:43.649 Everybody saw it as their responsibility to help. I remember at one point during this 00:14:43.649 --> 00:14:47.389 period I held a meeting with a bunch of startups in New York, trying to encourage everyone 00:14:47.389 --> 00:14:51.360 to get involved, and I felt a bit like I was hosting one of these Clinton Global Initiative 00:14:51.360 --> 00:14:54.620 meetings, where I got to turn to every startup in the—every startup founder in the room 00:14:54.620 --> 00:14:58.079 and be like, "What are you going to do? And what are you going to do?" And everyone was 00:14:58.079 --> 00:15:00.199 trying to one-up each other. 00:15:00.199 --> 00:15:05.029 If there was one day the shift crystallized, I think it was the day of the hearings on 00:15:05.029 --> 00:15:09.870 SOPA in the House, the day we got that phrase, "It’s no longer OK not to understand how 00:15:09.870 --> 00:15:15.319 the Internet works." There was just something about watching those clueless members of Congress 00:15:15.319 --> 00:15:19.209 debate the bill, watching them insist they could regulate the Internet and a bunch of 00:15:19.209 --> 00:15:24.130 nerds couldn’t possibly stop them. They really brought it home for people that this 00:15:24.130 --> 00:15:30.410 was happening, that Congress was going to break the Internet, and it just didn’t care. 00:15:30.410 --> 00:15:35.680 I remember when this moment first hit me. I was at an event, and I was talking, and 00:15:35.680 --> 00:15:40.089 I got introduced to a U.S. senator, one of the strongest proponents of the original COICA 00:15:40.089 --> 00:15:45.089 bill, in fact. And I asked him why, despite being such a progressive, despite giving a 00:15:45.089 --> 00:15:49.860 speech in favor of civil liberties, why he was supporting a bill that would censor the 00:15:49.860 --> 00:15:56.100 Internet. And, you know, that typical politician smile he had suddenly faded from his face, 00:15:56.100 --> 00:16:01.079 and his eyes started burning this fiery red. And he started shouting at me, said, "Those 00:16:01.079 --> 00:16:05.279 people on the Internet, they think they can get away with anything! They think they can 00:16:05.279 --> 00:16:09.690 just put anything up there, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them! They put up 00:16:09.690 --> 00:16:13.990 everything! They put up our nuclear missiles, and they just laugh at us! Well, we’re going 00:16:13.990 --> 00:16:17.899 to show them! There’s got to be laws on the Internet! It’s got to be under control!" 00:16:17.899 --> 00:16:24.170 Now, as far as I know, nobody has ever put up the U.S.'s nuclear missiles on the Internet. 00:16:24.170 --> 00:16:30.129 I mean, it's not something I’ve heard about. But that’s sort of the point. He wasn’t 00:16:30.129 --> 00:16:34.970 having a rational concern, right? It was this irrational fear that things were out of control. 00:16:34.970 --> 00:16:40.279 Here was this man, a United States senator, and those people on the Internet, they were 00:16:40.279 --> 00:16:47.240 just mocking him. They had to be brought under control. Things had to be under control. And 00:16:47.240 --> 00:16:52.480 I think that was the attitude of Congress. And just as seeing that fire in that senator’s 00:16:52.480 --> 00:16:58.069 eyes scared me, I think those hearings scared a lot of people. They saw this wasn’t the 00:16:58.069 --> 00:17:01.990 attitude of a thoughtful government trying to resolve trade-offs in order to best represent 00:17:01.990 --> 00:17:08.990 its citizens. This was more like the attitude of a tyrant. And so the citizens fought back. 00:17:12.419 --> 00:17:16.949 The wheels came off the bus pretty quickly after that hearing. First the Republican senators 00:17:16.949 --> 00:17:21.839 pulled out, and then the White House issued a statement opposing the bill, and then the 00:17:21.839 --> 00:17:26.449 Democrats, left all alone out there, announced they were putting the bill on hold so they 00:17:26.449 --> 00:17:32.200 could have a few further discussions before the official vote. And that was when, as hard 00:17:32.200 --> 00:17:38.289 as it was for me to believe, after all this, we had won. The thing that everyone said was 00:17:38.289 --> 00:17:41.840 impossible, that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a 00:17:41.840 --> 00:17:48.840 pipe dream, had happened. We did it. We won. 00:17:51.289 --> 00:17:56.990 And then we started rubbing it in. You all know what happened next. Wikipedia went black. 00:17:56.990 --> 00:18:03.059 Reddit went black. Craigslist went black. The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat-out melted. 00:18:03.059 --> 00:18:06.980 Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the 00:18:06.980 --> 00:18:12.400 bill that they were promoting just a couple days ago. And it was just ridiculous. I mean, 00:18:12.400 --> 00:18:16.980 there’s a chart from the time that captures it pretty well. It says something like "January 00:18:16.980 --> 00:18:21.440 14th" on one side and has this big, long list of names supporting the bill, and then just 00:18:21.440 --> 00:18:26.880 a few lonely people opposing it; and on the other side, it says "January 15th," and now 00:18:26.880 --> 00:18:31.539 it’s totally reversed—everyone is opposing it, just a few lonely names still hanging 00:18:31.539 --> 00:18:33.320 on in support. 00:18:33.320 --> 00:18:40.320 I mean, this really was unprecedented. Don’t take my word for it, but ask former Senator 00:18:40.690 --> 00:18:47.510 Chris Dodd, now the chief lobbyist for Hollywood. He admitted, after he lost, that he had masterminded 00:18:47.510 --> 00:18:52.870 the whole evil plan. And he told The New York Times he had never seen anything like it during 00:18:52.870 --> 00:18:59.120 his many years in Congress. And everyone I’ve spoken to agrees. The people rose up, and 00:18:59.120 --> 00:19:04.049 they caused a sea change in Washington—not the press, which refused to cover the story—just 00:19:04.049 --> 00:19:09.130 coincidentally, their parent companies all happened to be lobbying for the bill; not 00:19:09.130 --> 00:19:14.280 the politicians, who were pretty much unanimously in favor of it; and not the companies, who 00:19:14.280 --> 00:19:19.130 had all but given up trying to stop it and decided it was inevitable. It was really stopped 00:19:19.130 --> 00:19:26.130 by the people, the people themselves. They killed the bill dead, so dead that when members 00:19:28.870 --> 00:19:33.710 of Congress propose something now that even touches the Internet, they have to give a 00:19:33.710 --> 00:19:40.710 long speech beforehand about how it is definitely not like SOPA; so dead that when you ask congressional 00:19:41.400 --> 00:19:46.880 staffers about it, they groan and shake their heads like it’s all a bad dream they’re 00:19:46.880 --> 00:19:53.880 trying really hard to forget; so dead that it’s kind of hard to believe this story, 00:19:55.390 --> 00:20:01.679 hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing, hard to remember how this 00:20:01.679 --> 00:20:08.679 could have gone any other way. But it wasn’t a dream or a nightmare; it was all very real. 00:20:08.990 --> 00:20:15.870 And it will happen again. Sure, it will have yet another name, and maybe a different excuse, 00:20:15.870 --> 00:20:21.190 and probably do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake: The enemies of the 00:20:21.190 --> 00:20:26.679 freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politicians’ eyes hasn’t 00:20:26.679 --> 00:20:32.320 been put out. There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who want to clamp 00:20:32.320 --> 00:20:37.070 down on the Internet. And to be honest, there aren’t a whole lot who have a vested interest 00:20:37.070 --> 00:20:42.640 in protecting it from all of that. Even some of the biggest companies, some of the biggest 00:20:42.640 --> 00:20:46.730 Internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit from a world in which their little 00:20:46.730 --> 00:20:51.539 competitors could get censored. We can’t let that happen. 00:20:51.539 --> 00:20:57.010 Now, I’ve told this as a personal story, partly because I think big stories like this 00:20:57.010 --> 00:21:01.840 one are just more interesting at human scale. The director J.D. Walsh says good stories 00:21:01.840 --> 00:21:06.630 should be like the poster for Transformers. There’s a huge evil robot on the left side 00:21:06.630 --> 00:21:12.470 of the poster and a huge, big army on the right side of the poster. And in the middle, 00:21:12.470 --> 00:21:17.870 at the bottom, there’s just a small family trapped in the middle. Big stories need human 00:21:17.870 --> 00:21:22.710 stakes. But mostly, it’s a personal story, because I didn’t have time to research any 00:21:22.710 --> 00:21:29.120 of the other part of it. But that’s kind of the point. We won this fight because everyone 00:21:29.120 --> 00:21:35.929 made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this 00:21:35.929 --> 00:21:39.779 crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it. They did whatever they could think of 00:21:39.779 --> 00:21:46.450 to do. They didn’t stop to ask anyone for permission. You remember how Hacker News readers 00:21:46.450 --> 00:21:53.190 spontaneously organized this boycott of GoDaddy over their support of SOPA? Nobody told them 00:21:53.190 --> 00:21:58.380 they could do that. A few people even thought it was a bad idea. It didn’t matter. The 00:21:58.380 --> 00:22:05.380 senators were right: The Internet really is out of control. But if we forget that, if 00:22:05.970 --> 00:22:10.620 we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, 00:22:10.620 --> 00:22:14.610 if we let them persuade us we didn’t actually make a difference, if we start seeing it as 00:22:14.610 --> 00:22:19.220 someone else’s responsibility to do this work and it’s our job just to go home and 00:22:19.220 --> 00:22:25.539 pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers, well, then next time 00:22:25.539 --> 00:22:32.539 they might just win. Let’s not let that happen.