F2C2012: Aaron Swartz keynote - "How we stopped SOPA"

Aaron Swartz keynote - "How we stopped SOPA" at F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012, Washington DC on May 21 2012.

http://freedom-to-connect.net/

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

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

and I got a phone call from my friend Peter.

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

"What is it?" I said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Not something obscure, like copyright law."

I could hear Peter grumbling in the background:

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

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

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

Now I was listening.

Peter explained what you've probably long since learned,

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

that Americans weren't allowed to visit.

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

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

I said it was online censorship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But this was something radically different.

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

a particular material that was illegal.

It shut down whole websites.

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

There's nothing really like it in US law.

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

requiring you be mute for the next couple of weeks.

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

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

and then your life goes on.

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

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

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

But even that was eventually declared unconstitutional,

a violation of the First Amendment.

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

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

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

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

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

and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment.

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

when copyright was an issue.

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

if you wanted to come up with some way

that the government could shut down access to particular websites,

this bill might be the only way to do it.

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

just like in the old bookstore case. (?)

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

And that was especially terrifying, because as you know,

copyright is everywhere.

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

because they have too much pornography,

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

Because everything is copyright.

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

And it's so easy to accidentally copy something.

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

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

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

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

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

in terms of traditional things that the law understands.

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

or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend?

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

or a violent smashing of shop windows?

Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech

or like the freedom to murder?

This bill would be potentially a huge, permanent loss.

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

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

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

New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom,

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

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

But it was going to happen.

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

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

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

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

you can't pass a bill without a vote.

The results of that vote were already a foregone conclusion,

because if you looked at the introduction of the law,

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

it was introduced by the Chair of the Judiciary Committee

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

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

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

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

This is emphatically not how Congress works.

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

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

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

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

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

and then, days of experts talking about the issue,

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

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

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

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

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

which you hash out in endless back room meetings.

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

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

And then you have the vote.

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

and then pass it unanimously a couple of days later.

That just doesn't happen in Congress.

But this time, it was going to happen.

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

There are always disagreements.

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

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

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

Other Senators thought it was a drop too strong.

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

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

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

a bill that would censor the internet.

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

Now the typical way you make good things happen in Washington

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

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

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

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

to pay for his workers' pension funds.

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

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

I think it's fantastic.

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

is you find a big company willing to back them.

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

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

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

as Hollywood has been telling it:

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

who make millions of dollars off of copyright infringement.

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