SOPA and how it will affect you.

SOPA .When Rep. Lamar Smith announced the Stop Online Piracy Act  in late Octo­ber, he knew it was going to be controversial.

But the Texas Repub­li­can prob­a­bly never antic­i­pated the broad and fierce out­cry from Inter­net users that SOPA pro­voked over the last few months. It was a show of pub­lic oppo­si­tion to Internet-related leg­is­la­tion not seen since the 2003 polit­i­cal wran­gling over implant­ing copy-protection tech­nol­ogy in PCs, or per­haps even the blue rib­bons appear­ing on Web sites in the mid-1990s in response to the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Decency Act.

As CNET reported in Decem­ber, Smith, a self-described for­mer ranch man­ager whose con­gres­sional dis­trict encom­passes the crop­land and graz­ing land stretch­ing between Austin and San Anto­nio, Texas, has become Hollywood’s favorite Repub­li­can. The TV, movie, and music indus­tries are the top donors to his 2012 cam­paign com­mit­tee, and he’s been feted by music and movie indus­try lob­by­ists at din­ners and concerts.

To learn how SOPA, and its Sen­ate cousin known as the Pro­tect IP Act, would affect you, keep read­ing. CNET has com­piled a list of fre­quently asked ques­tions on the topic:

SOPA Needs your Voice

Q: What’s the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for SOPA and Pro­tect IP?
Two words: rogue sites.

That’s Hollywood’s term for Web sites that hap­pen to be located in a nation more hos­pitable to copy­right infringe­ment than the United States is (in fact, the U.S. is prob­a­bly the least hos­pitable juris­dic­tion in the world for such an endeavor). Because the tar­get is off­shore, a law­suit against the own­ers in a U.S. court would be futile.

The U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce, in a let­ter to the edi­tor of The New York Times, put it this way: “Rogue Web sites that steal America’s inno­v­a­tive and cre­ative prod­ucts attract more than 53 bil­lion vis­its a year and threaten more than 19 mil­lion Amer­i­can jobs.” The MPAA has a sec­tion of its Web site devoted to rogue Web sites. Jim Hood, the Demo­c­ra­tic attor­ney gen­eral of Mis­sis­sippi, and co-chair of a National Asso­ci­a­tion of Attor­neys Gen­eral com­mit­tee on the topic, recently likened rogue Web sites to child porn.

Who’s opposed to SOPA?
Much of the Inter­net indus­try and a large per­cent­age of Inter­net users. Here’s the most cur­rent list (PDF) of opponents.

On Novem­ber 15, Google, Face­book, Twit­ter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedInwrote a let­ter to key mem­bers of the U.S. Sen­ate and House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, say­ing SOPA poses “a seri­ous risk to our industry’s con­tin­ued track record of inno­va­tion and job cre­ation, as well as to our nation’s cyber­se­cu­rity.” Yahoo has report­edly quit the U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce over the organization’s enthu­si­as­tic sup­port for SOPA.

The Euro­pean Par­lia­ment adopted a res­o­lu­tion last week stress­ing “the need to pro­tect the integrity of the global Inter­net and free­dom of com­mu­ni­ca­tion by refrain­ing from uni­lat­eral mea­sures to revoke IP addresses or domain names.” Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Demo­c­ra­tic leader, said in a mes­sage on Twit­ter last week that we “need to find a bet­ter solu­tion than #SOPA.”

A let­ter signed by Reps. Zoe Lof­gren and Anna Eshoo, both Cal­i­for­nia Democ­rats, and
Rep. Ron Paul, the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date from Texas, pre­dicts that SOPA will invite “an explo­sion of innovation-killing law­suits and lit­i­ga­tion.” Law pro­fes­sors have also raised con­cerns. And yes, there is a protest song.

How would SOPA work?
It allows the U.S. attor­ney gen­eral to seek a court order against the tar­geted off­shore Web site that would, in turn, be served on Inter­net providers in an effort to make the tar­get vir­tu­ally dis­ap­pear. It’s kind of an Inter­net death penalty.

More specif­i­cally, sec­tion 102 of SOPA says that, after being served with a removal order:

 A ser­vice provider shall take tech­ni­cally fea­si­ble and rea­son­able mea­sures designed to pre­vent access by its sub­scribers located within the United States to the for­eign infring­ing site (or por­tion thereof) that is sub­ject to the order…Such actions shall be taken as expe­di­tiously as pos­si­ble, but in any case within five days after being served with a copy of the order, or within such time as the court may order.

How is SOPA dif­fer­ent from the ear­lier Sen­ate bill called the Pro­tect IP Act?
Pro­tect IP tar­geted only domain name sys­tem providers, finan­cial com­pa­nies, and ad networks–not com­pa­nies that pro­vide Inter­net connectivity.

Because SOPA is broader, even some com­pa­nies who liked, or at least weren’t vocally opposed to, the Sen­ate bill aren’t exactly delighted with the House version.

“Ver­i­zon con­tin­ues to look at SOPA, and while it’s fair to say that we have con­cerns about the leg­is­la­tion, we are work­ing with con­gres­sional staff to address those con­cerns,” a rep­re­sen­ta­tive told us.

Tim McK­one, AT&T’s exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of fed­eral rela­tions, said that “we have been sup­port­ive of the gen­eral frame­work” of the Sen­ate bill. But when it comes to SOPA, all AT&T would say is that it is “work­ing con­struc­tively with Chair­man Smith and oth­ers toward a sim­i­lar end in the House.”

What are the security-related impli­ca­tions of SOPA?

One big one is how it inter­acts with the domain name sys­tem and a set of secu­rity improve­ments to it known as DNSSEC.

The idea of DNSSEC is to pro­mote end-to-end encryp­tion of domain names, mean­ing there’s no break in the chain between, say, Wellsfargo.com and its cus­tomer. Requir­ing Inter­net providers to redi­rect allegedly pirat­i­cal domain names to, say, the FBI’s servers isn’t com­pat­i­ble with DNSSEC.

Rep. Dan Lun­gren, who heads the Home­land Secu­rity sub­com­mit­tee on cybersecurity, has saidthat an “unin­tended con­se­quence” of SOPA would be to “under­cut” the effort his panel has been mak­ing to pro­mote DNSSEC.

The San­dia National Lab­o­ra­to­ries, part of the U.S. Depart­ment of Energy, has also raised con­cerns about SOPA, say­ing it is “unlikely to be effec­tive” and will “neg­a­tively impact U.S. and global cyber­se­cu­rity and Inter­net func­tion­al­ity.” And Stew­art Baker, the for­mer pol­icy chief at the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity who’s now in pri­vate practice, warned in an op-ed that SOPA “runs directly counter” to the House’s own cyber­se­cu­rity efforts.

An analy­sis (PDF) of Pro­tect IP pre­pared by five Inter­net researchers this spring lists poten­tial secu­rity prob­lems. Among them: it’s “incom­pat­i­ble” with DNSSEC, inno­cent Web sites will be swept in as “col­lat­eral dam­age,” and the black­list can be bypassed by using the numeric Inter­net address of a Web site. The address for CNET.com, for instance, is cur­rently 64.30.224.118.

What will SOPA require Inter­net providers to do?
A little-noticed por­tion of the pro­posed law, which CNET high­lighted in an arti­cle, goes fur­ther than Pro­tect IP and could require Inter­net providers to mon­i­tor cus­tomers’ traf­fic and block Web sites sus­pected of copy­right infringement.

SOPA “It would cover IP block­ing,” says Markham Erick­son, head of Net­Coali­tion, whose mem­bers include Amazon.com, Google, eBay, and Yahoo. “I think it con­tem­plates deep packet inspec­tion” as well, he said.

The exact require­ments will depend on what the removal order says. The Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica says that SOPA could be used to force Inter­net providers to block by “Inter­net Pro­to­col address” and deny “access to only the ille­gal part of the site.” It would come as no sur­prise if copy­right hold­ers sug­gested word­ing to the Jus­tice Depart­ment, which would in turn seek a judge’s sig­na­ture on the removal order.

Deep packet inspec­tion, mean­ing forc­ing an Inter­net provider to inter­cept and ana­lyze cus­tomers’ Web traf­fic, is the only way to block access to spe­cific URLs.

Smith’s revised ver­sion (PDF) may limit the block­ing require­ment to DNS block­ing. Its “safe har­bor” lan­guage indi­cates that not resolv­ing “the domain name of the for­eign infring­ing site” may be suf­fi­cient, but some ambi­gu­ity remains.

Are there free speech impli­ca­tions to SOPA?
SOPA’s oppo­nents say so–a New York Times op-ed called it the “Great Fire­wall of America–and the lan­guage of the bill itself is quite broad. Sec­tion 103 says that, to be black­listed, a Web site must be “directed” at the U.S. and also that the owner “has pro­moted” acts that can infringe copyright.

Here’s how Sec­tion 101 of the orig­i­nal ver­sion of SOPA defines what a U.S.-directed Web site is:

(A) the Inter­net site is used to pro­vide goods or ser­vices to users located in the United States;
(B) there is evi­dence that the Inter­net site or por­tion thereof is intended to offer or pro­vide such goods and ser­vices (or) access to such goods and ser­vices (or) deliv­ery of such goods and ser­vices to users located in the United States;
© the Inter­net site or por­tion thereof does not con­tain rea­son­able mea­sures to pre­vent such goods and ser­vices from being obtained in or deliv­ered to the United States; and
(D) any prices for goods and ser­vices are indi­cated or billed in the cur­rency of the United States.

Some crit­ics have charged that such lan­guage could black­list the next YouTube, Wikipedia, or Wik­iLeaks. Espe­cially in the case of Wik­iLeaks, which has posted inter­nal doc­u­ments not only from gov­ern­ments but also copy­righted doc­u­ments from U.S. com­pa­nies and has threat­ened to post more, it’s hard to see how it would not qual­ify for blacklisting.

Lau­rence Tribe, a high-profile Har­vard law pro­fes­sor and author of a trea­tise titled Amer­i­can Con­sti­tu­tional Law, has argued that SOPA is uncon­sti­tu­tional because, if enacted, “an entire Web site con­tain­ing tens of thou­sands of pages could be tar­geted if only a sin­gle page were accused of infringement.”

What has the response to this lan­guage been?
Mozilla, which makes the Fire­fox Web browser, responded by cre­at­ing a page say­ing: “Pro­tect the Inter­net: Help us stop the Inter­net Black­list Leg­is­la­tion.” It warns that “your favorite Web sites both inside and out­side the US could be blocked based on an infringe­ment claim.”

Web sites includ­ing Wiki­me­dia (as in, Wikipedia) charged that SOPA is an “Inter­net black­list bill” that “would allow cor­po­ra­tions, orga­ni­za­tions, or the gov­ern­ment to order an Inter­net ser­vice provider to block an entire Web site sim­ply due to an alle­ga­tion that the site posted infring­ing con­tent.” Tum­blr “cen­sored” its users’ con­tent streams, and reported that its users aver­aged 3.6 calls per sec­ond to Con­gress through the company’s Web site–nearly 90,000 total.

With a bit of HTML from AmericanCensorship.org, a Web site sup­ported by the Free Soft­ware Foun­da­tion, the Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, and Pub­lic Knowl­edge, hun­dreds of Web sites “cen­sored” them­selves to protest SOPA. Even Lof­gren, from Sil­i­con Val­ley, has joined the fight-censorship protest.

For their part, the Motion Pic­ture Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica (MPAA) has been high­light­ing an analy­sis it com­mis­sioned from First Amend­ment lawyer Floyd Abrams, a for­mer MPAA attor­ney, who con­cluded SOPA is per­fectly con­sti­tu­tional. Here’s another pro-SOPA rebut­tal.

Who sup­ports SOPA?
The three orga­ni­za­tions that have prob­a­bly been the most vocal are the MPAA, the Record­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica, and the U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce. A Politico chart shows that Hol­ly­wood has out­spent Sil­i­con Val­ley by about ten­fold on lob­by­ists in the last two years. Here’s a CNET arti­cle on why the Cham­ber is so pro-SOPA.

Sup­port­ers pub­li­cized let­ters from the National Fra­ter­nal Order of Police and the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Fire Fight­ers lend­ing their weight to the Web-blocking idea. Here are more state­ments from sup­port­ers at the time of SOPA’s intro­duc­tion. And the AFL-CIO sent a rep­re­sen­ta­tive to tes­tify in sup­port of SOPA at last week’s House hearing.

Over 400 busi­nesses and orga­ni­za­tions have sent a let­ter sup­port­ing SOPA.

And in the U.S. Con­gress?
Sup­port for Pro­tect IP is remark­ably broad, and for SOPA a lit­tle less so. An analy­sis by the RIAA says that of some 1,900 bills that have been intro­duced in the Sen­ate, only 18 other bills enjoy the same num­ber of bipar­ti­san cospon­sors as Pro­tect IP does.

That puts it in the top 1 per­cent of most-popular bills, at least for this mea­sure­ment of con­gres­sional enthu­si­asm. Of Pro­tect IP’s spon­sors in the Sen­ate, over 60 per­cent are Democ­rats.

Here’s the list of Sen­ate spon­sors of Pro­tect IP–the total is 40 sen­a­tors. SOPA has only 24 cospon­sors, but it hasn’t been around as long. Rep. Dar­rell Issa, a Cal­i­for­nia Repub­li­can, hasintro­duced the so-called OPEN Act that would cut off the flow of funds to alleged pirate Web sites with­out requir­ing them to be blocked.

Would SOPA block Tor?
Per­haps. In an echo of the 1998 Dig­i­tal Mil­len­nium Copy­right Act’s anti­cir­cum­ven­tion sec­tion, SOPA tar­gets any­one who “know­ingly and will­fully pro­vides or offers to pro­vide a prod­uct or ser­vice designed or mar­keted by such entity…for the cir­cum­ven­tion or bypass­ing” of a Jus­tice Department-erected blockade.

Legal schol­ars con­tacted by CNET said Tor could qual­ify as a “cir­cum­ven­tion” tool, which would allow it to be targeted.

What hap­pens next?
In terms of Pro­tect IP, the Sen­ate Judi­ciary com­mit­tee has approved it and it’s wait­ing for a floor vote that has been sched­uled for Jan­u­ary 24. One hur­dle: Sen. Ron Wyden, an Ore­gon Demo­c­rat, has placed a hold on the bill.

Dur­ing a two-day debate in the House Judi­ciary com­mit­tee in mid-December, it became clear that SOPA sup­port­ers have a com­mand­ing major­ity on the com­mit­tee. They’re expected to approve it when Con­gress returns in 2012.

Where it goes from there is an open ques­tion that depends on where the House Repub­li­can lead­er­ship stands. Because the House’s floor sched­ule is under the con­trol of the major­ity party, the deci­sion will largely lie in the hands of House Speaker John Boehner and his lieutenants.

Another pos­si­bil­ity is that there could be fur­ther House hear­ings on the security-related impli­ca­tions of SOPA, a move that would delay a final vote. An aide to House Judi­ciary Chair­man Lamar Smith pre­vi­ously told CNET that there’s no indi­ca­tion yet as to any fur­ther hear­ings, but after the com­mit­tee debate in Decem­ber, don’t be sur­prised if it happens.

SOPA

The post was pub­lished on CNET by Declan McCul­lagh , the chief polit­i­cal cor­re­spon­dent for CNET. Declan pre­vi­ously was a reporter for Time and the Wash­ing­ton bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Tak­ing Lib­er­ties sec­tion and Other People’s Money col­umn for CBS News’ Web site.

Tagged as: Sopa, Stop Online Piracy Act