Bringing SOPA to the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Robert Holleyman in the Seat 
by BINOY KAMPMARK


The machinery to dominate global intellectual property by American fiat was further tightened by the announcement of Robert Holleyman as deputy US trade representative. President Obama’s announcement is just another reminder what sources of inspiration are governing the drive by Washington to control the downloading and dissemination of information via the Trans-Pacific Partnership. After all, Holleyman was a former lobbyist of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the bill introduced by US Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tx) to gift US law enforcement authorities with the means to combat copyright infringements.

Indeed, Holleyman’s own blurb as an author for The Huffington Post considers him as “one of the 50 most influential people in the intellectual property world”, an individual who “was instrumental in putting into place the global policy framework that today protects software under copyright law.” Such is the nature of mislabelled internationalism – Washington’s policy by another name.

Holleyman has also been heavily involved as a former president of the Business Software Alliance, a body representing the main software vendors including Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. Through the consortium, Holleyman unintentionally put the problems of SOPA, and its sister legislation, PROTECT-IP, in the bright spotlight. He found himself fighting, at least for a time, a losing battle. Protest against them was extensive, with January 18, 2012 featuring the “largest online protest in history”.[1] Congress took heed, shelving the bills. The vendors pondered the next move.

SOPA’s reach would have been global, enabling US law enforcement the means to target websites and individuals outside its jurisdiction. The carceral provisions of the bill were also hefty – five year prison terms for downloading unauthorised content.

It would have also been a rather formidable mechanism to insinuate censorship into the Internet. The legislation would allow the content provider or the US Justice Department to block sites hosting material supposedly in breach of copyright. Having such a provision would effectively overburden internet service providers to err on the side of caution and “over-block”[2] material. If ever you want to enshrine censorship, a fine way of doing so is frightening the hosts into censoring themselves.

The secret negotiations of the TPP have proven to be a feast of select company. The negotiators themselves, such as Stefan Selig[3], nominee for under-secretary for international trade at the Commerce Department, have a direct line to the Bank of America. Selig’s accounts have been inflated to the tune of $9.1 million in bonus pay and $5.1 million in incentive pay. Happy is the bank that can sue for diminished assets and target governments in courts of law.

The clubbable ones are the software demons who have been “cleared” to have briefings, some 700 “stakeholders”. The “cleared advisors”[4] also represent groups such as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the Entertainment Software Association, and the Recording Industry Association of America.

While the premise of having such vendors involved is ostensibly to protect innovation, the converse is true. The world of innovation does not matter to those who claim they have the ideas and want to protect them at cost. That is a recipe for sloppiness and envy.

The anti-democratic slant in the TPP process has also impressed itself upon observers. The press, and even members of Congress, have been kept at bay. Till parts of the treaty were published by WikiLeaks, elected officials could only view the document on visiting the Trade Representative Office. They would not be able[5] to reproduce or transcribe it.

While SOPA and its twin PIPA were shelved indefinitely, the Obama administration has decided shop in other forums to enforce some of their provisions. One way of doing so is through the faulty premise of free trade, which is simply another way of making some trade freer than others. The American firm features prominently in that guise of freedom.

Aspects of the leaked intellectual property chapter of the TPP so far indicate a model with SOPA trimmings. Provisions, for example, holding ISPs liable for hosting copyright infringement, have been preserved. The life of certain, corporate-owned copyrights will also be extended. In other words, this is SOPA by stealth, a process that “could not [be] achieved through an open democratic process.”[6]

The fact that the Obama administration has also sought to sideline Congress in the debate is indicative of that. As Henry Farrell[7] observed, “The United States appears to be using the non-transparent Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations as a deliberate end run around Congress on intellectual property, to achieve a presumably unpopular set of policy goals.” Senate Democrats have been mindful of their shrinking role, and have blocked the president’s attempt to obtain “fast-track authorisation”.

The effect of such authorisation would give the administration scope to limit congressional consultation while using its prerogative powers. Congress would become, in effect, a chamber of marionettes. Appointments such as Holleyman’s show little change of heart away from that policy. The copyright vanguard, along with the dance of secrecy, is digging its heels in.

Notes. [1] http://sopastrike.com/ [2] http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2011/11/stop-censorship-problems-sopa [3] http://www.scribd.com/doc/202241350/Stefan-M-Selig [4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/15/five-key-questions-and-answers-about-the-leaked-tpp-text/ [5] http://www.mintpressnews.com/obama-chooses-sopa-lobbyist-to-negotiate-trans-pacific-partnership-treaty/180837/
[6] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/15/five-key-questions-and-answers-about-the-leaked-tpp-text/
[7] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/15/five-key-questions-and-answers-about-the-leaked-tpp-text/

The Inspiring Heroism of Aaron Swartz

Sunday, January 13, 2013 by The Guardian/UK
The internet freedom activist committed suicide on Friday at age 26, but his life was driven by courage and passion
by Glenn Greenwald

Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer and internet freedom activist, committed suicide on Friday in New York at the age of 26. As the incredibly moving remembrances from his friends such as Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig attest, he was unquestionably brilliant but also - like most everyone - a complex human being plagued by demons and flaws. For many reasons, I don't believe in whitewashing someone's life or beatifying them upon death. But, to me, much of Swartz's tragically short life was filled with acts that are genuinely and, in the most literal and noble sense, heroic. I think that's really worth thinking about today.

At the age of 14, Swartz played a key role in developing the RSS software that is still widely used to enable people to manage what they read on the internet. As a teenager, he also played a vital role in the creation of Reddit, the wildly popular social networking news site. When Conde Nast purchased Reddit, Swartz received a substantial sum of money at a very young age. He became something of a legend in the internet and programming world before he was 18. His path to internet mogul status and the great riches it entails was clear, easy and virtually guaranteed: a path which so many other young internet entrepreneurs have found irresistible, monomaniacally devoting themselves to making more and more money long after they have more than they could ever hope to spend.

But rather obviously, Swartz had little interest in devoting his life to his own material enrichment, despite how easy it would have been for him. As Lessig wrote: "Aaron had literally done nothing in his life 'to make money' . . . Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good."

Specifically, he committed himself to the causes in which he so passionately believed: internet freedom, civil liberties, making information and knowledge as available as possible. Here he is in his May, 2012 keynote address at the Freedom To Connect conference discussing the role he played in stopping SOPA, the movie-industry-demanded legislation that would have vested the government with dangerous censorship powers over the internet.

Critically, Swartz didn't commit himself to these causes merely by talking about them or advocating for them. He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values and challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that were their enemies. That's what makes him, in my view, so consummately heroic.

In 2008, Swartz targeted Pacer, the online service that provides access to court documents for a per-page fee. What offended Swartz and others was that people were forced to pay for access to public court documents that were created at public expense. Along with a friend, Swartz created a program to download millions of those documents and then, as Doctorow wrote, "spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain." For that act of civil disobedience, he was investigated and harassed by the FBI, but never charged.

But in July 2011, Swartz was arrested for allegedly targeting JSTOR, the online publishing company that digitizes and distributes scholarly articles written by academics and then sells them, often at a high price, to subscribers. As Maria Bustillos detailed, none of the money goes to the actual writers (usually professors) who wrote the scholarly articles - they are usually not paid for writing them - but instead goes to the publishers.

This system offended Swartz (and many other free-data activists) for two reasons: it charged large fees for access to these articles but did not compensate the authors, and worse, it ensured that huge numbers of people are denied access to the scholarship produced by America's colleges and universities. The indictment filed against Swartz alleged that he used his access as a Harvard fellow to the JSTOR system to download millions of articles with the intent to distribute them online for free; when he was detected and his access was cut off, the indictment claims he then trespassed into an MIT computer-wiring closet in order to physically download the data directly onto his laptop.

Swartz never distributed any of these downloaded articles. He never intended to profit even a single penny from anything he did, and never did profit in any way. He had every right to download the articles as an authorized JSTOR user; at worst, he intended to violate the company's "terms of service" by making the articles available to the public. Once arrested, he returned all copies of everything he downloaded and vowed not to use them. JSTOR told federal prosecutors that it had no intent to see him prosecuted, though MIT remained ambiguous about its wishes.

But federal prosecutors ignored the wishes of the alleged "victims". Led by a federal prosecutor in Boston notorious for her overzealous prosecutions, the DOJ threw the book at him, charging Swartz with multiple felonies which carried a total sentence of several decades in prison and $1 million in fines.

Swartz's trial on these criminal charges was scheduled to begin in two months. He adamantly refused to plead guilty to a felony because he did not want to spend the rest of his life as a convicted felon with all the stigma and rights-denials that entails. The criminal proceedings, as Lessig put it, already put him in a predicament where "his wealth [was] bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge."

To say that the DOJ's treatment of Swartz was excessive and vindictive is an extreme understatement. When I wrote about Swartz's plight last August, I wrote that he was "being prosecuted by the DOJ with obscene over-zealousness". Timothy Lee wrote the definitive article in 2011 explaining why, even if all the allegations in the indictment are true, the only real crime committed by Swartz was basic trespassing, for which people are punished, at most, with 30 days in jail and a $100 fine, about which Lee wrote: "That seems about right: if he's going to serve prison time, it should be measured in days rather than years."

Nobody knows for sure why federal prosecutors decided to pursue Swartz so vindictively, as though he had committed some sort of major crime that deserved many years in prison and financial ruin. Some theorized that the DOJ hated him for his serial activism and civil disobedience. Others speculated that, as Doctorow put it, "the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them."

I believe it has more to do with what I told the New York Times' Noam Cohen for an article he wrote on Swartz's case. Swartz's activism, I argued, was waged as part of one of the most vigorously contested battles - namely, the war over how the internet is used and who controls the information that flows on it - and that was his real crime in the eyes of the US government: challenging its authority and those of corporate factions to maintain a stranglehold on that information. In that above-referenced speech on SOPA, Swartz discussed the grave dangers to internet freedom and free expression and assembly posed by the government's efforts to control the internet with expansive interpretations of copyright law and other weapons to limit access to information.

That's a major part of why I consider him heroic. He wasn't merely sacrificing himself for a cause. It was a cause of supreme importance to people and movements around the world - internet freedom - and he did it by knowingly confronting the most powerful state and corporate factions because he concluded that was the only way to achieve these ends.

Suicide is an incredibly complicated phenomenon. I didn't know Swartz nearly well enough even to form an opinion about what drove him to do this; I had a handful of exchanges with him online in which we said nice things about each other's work and I truly admired him. I'm sure even his closest friends and family are struggling to understand exactly what caused him to defy his will to live by taking his own life.

But, despite his public and very sad writings about battling depression, it only stands to reason that a looming criminal trial that could send him to prison for decades played some role in this; even if it didn't, this persecution by the DOJ is an outrage and an offense against all things decent, for the reasons Lessig wrote today:

"Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen', we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

"A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don't get both, you don't deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

"For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to 'justice' never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled 'felons'."

Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed by a "justice" system that fully protects the most egregious criminals as long as they are members of or useful to the nation's most powerful factions, but punishes with incomparable mercilessness and harshness those who lack power and, most of all, those who challenge power.

Swartz knew all of this. But he forged ahead anyway. He could have easily opted for a life of great personal wealth, status, prestige and comfort. He chose instead to fight - selflessly, with conviction and purpose, and at great risk to himself - for noble causes to which he was passionately devoted. That, to me, isn't an example of heroism; it's the embodiment of it, its purest expression. It's the attribute our country has been most lacking.

I always found it genuinely inspiring to watch Swartz exude this courage and commitment at such a young age. His death had better prompt some serious examination of the DOJ's behavior - both in his case and its warped administration of justice generally. But his death will also hopefully strengthen the inspirational effects of thinking about and understanding the extraordinary acts he undertook in his short life.


UPDATE

From the official statement of Swartz's family:

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles."

This sort of unrestrained prosecutorial abuse is, unfortunately, far from uncommon. It usually destroys people without attention or notice. Let's hope - and work to ensure that - the attention generated by Swartz's case prompts some movement toward accountability and reform.

IPAA Wording Virtually the Same as SOPA

With very few differences.

Read the full text of IPAA here (pdf).

ACTA: An International SOPA

By Sandra Fulton, ACLU Washington Legislative Office

While the Internet community came out in force to protest the free speech and privacy threats posed by the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an international trade agreement with the same stated goals—and potentially greater threats—was being negotiated behind closed doors. While the First Amendment can be served by intellectual property protections that incentivize content creation, IP laws can easily be misused. Like PIPA and SOPA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (“ACTA”) is another misguided and overbroad attempt to crack down on counterfeiting and piracy over the Internet. There has been excellent analysis of the issue by sources including EFF, Tech Dirt and Ars Technica, but we have also been watching this issue and wanted to summarize what’s at stake.

While many of the worst provisions of ACTA were ultimately watered down (mainly due to pressure from outside groups reacting to leaked drafts), many issues remain, both procedural and substantive. There are four primary problems with ACTA.

1. Tying Congress’s Hands on Copyright Law

     While supporters of ACTA insist it does not change U.S. law (were it technically to change existing law, it would require Senate ratification) opponents have different concerns—namely, that it will reinforce current copyright laws in an area that is changing rapidly and many believe should be updated. Opponents fear that signing the agreement will make it unnecessarily more difficult for Congress to update copyright laws while staying compliant with our new “international obligations.”

2. Lack of accountability

     Unlike PIPA and SOPA, ACTA would establish a new international body to enforce certain IP rules. This body would be made up of unelected members acting outside the purview of any current international institution. So, while SOPA and PIPA at least would have been enforced by U.S. agencies and subject to constitutional checks and balances, ACTA could be used for worldwide crackdowns on Internet activity by a coordinated authority that could work at cross-purposes with the laws and policies of the participating countries.

3. Negotiated in secret

     Despite the fact that such world-wide e-regulation has the potential to impact everyone with a computer, ACTA was negotiated in secret by a small, exclusive group of countries and a few private companies. The first the public heard about the talks was when WikiLeaks released a discussion document in May 2008. Both Presidents Bush and Obama rejected calls from advocates and members of Congress to make ACTA negotiations public, claiming that such disclosure would cause “damage to the national security.” However, a 2009 FOIA request found that the draft had been shared with Google, eBay, Dell, Intel, the Business Software Alliance, News Corporation, Sony Pictures, Time Warner, the Motion Picture Association of America, and Verizon under a nondisclosure agreement. Once the agreement was finalized it was posted to the United States Trade Representative’s website here.

4. Evading Senate approval

     To keep the negotiations secret and avoid having to obtain the Senate’s approval, the president is claiming that ACTA was negotiated within his presidential powers as a “sole executive agreement.” A sole executive agreement is one that the president may enter if the terms will not change U.S. law. However, the extent of the president’s authority to completely bypass Congressional approval and enter into a sole executive agreement is controversial. Earlier this month 50 leading U.S. legal scholars sent a letter to members of the Senate Finance Committee stating,

     the Administration currently lacks a means to constitutionally enter ACTA without ex post Congressional approval. The present issue reaches far beyond the topical matters covered by ACTA, into the fundamental Constitutional issue of separation of powers. If Congress allows the executive to claim that ACTA was authorized by language that clearly does not authorize the agreement, it will be ceding unprecedented power to the executive."

     Senator Wyden (D-OR) has also questioned the president’s authority to treat ACTA as a sole agreement. “There are questions of constitutional authority surrounding whether the administration can enter into this agreement without Congress’s approval,” he said. “Either way, when international accords, like ACTA, are conceived and constructed under a cloak of secrecy it is hard to argue that they represent the broad interests of the general public. The controversy over ACTA should surprise no one.”

     Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) warned participants at the World Economic Forum that ACTA was more dangerous than SOPA and PIPA and.then called into question the president’s authority to negotiate the agreement. He said, “It’s not coming to me for a vote. It purports that it does not change existing laws. But once implemented, it creates a whole new enforcement system and will virtually tie the hands of Congress to undo it.”

International opposition
To date the United States, the European Union (and 22 of its member states), Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea have all signed ACTA but none have formally ratified the agreement yet.

At the grassroots and at the highest levels of government, ACTA has sparked protests. In Poland, tens of thousands of people protested across the nation and activists attacked government websites when that country signed the agreement in January. Members of the Polish Parliament wore Guy Fawkes masks to demonstrate their disapproval. Since then, protests have been organized throughout Europe including in Sweden, Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, and the United Kingdom. Notably, Kader Arif, the first "rapporteur" for ACTA in the EU parliament (the member who prepares the official recommendation to the parliament on a legislative proposal), quit his role in disgust, stating,

I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organizations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament's demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.

This agreement might have major consequences on citizens' lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.

Arif’s successor, David Martin, recommended against adoption of the agreement, fearing unintended consequences and overbroad enforcement (though he also asked the parliament to consider a replacement).

Post-ACTA: The Trans-Pacific Partnership
Since ACTA’s completion we have learned that part of a new massive trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), aims "to ensure an effective and balanced approach to intellectual property rights among the TPP countries.” Talks on the TPP are currently being held between nine Pacific Rim countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States. Like ACTA all negotiations are being conducted behind closed doors with details shared only with Industry Trade Advisory Committees (ITAC). The U.S. ITAC is called ITAC 15 and includes top executives from AT&T, Verizon, the RIAA, the pharmaceutical lobby, and Cisco. All anyone else knows about the agreement comes from a leak of the "intellectual property chapter" that surfaced about a year ago. EFF’s international IP director, Gwen Hinze, told Ars Technica, “I would say it’s ACTA-plus, not ACTA redux,” Secret international trade agreements negotiated between only government and industry is not a trend we want to see catch on.

Healthy democracies depend on transparency and public debate. Good policies are created through the input of experts, advocates, industry, policy makers, and citizens. Circumventing basic checks and balances to fast-track policies that have already been defeated by the public—often called “policy laundering”— is not how representative democracy is supposed to work. Many fear that agreements made in ACTA and TPP will put our civil liberties at risk. At the very least, the president should allow a free and open debate on the measures.

Search engines are pressured to doctor results to favor copyright industries

By Muriel Kane - RAW Story
Sunday, March 4, 2012

There has been a great deal of concern recently over proposed legislation and treaties — such as SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and TPP — that would hand the copyright industries what are widely seen as unwarranted powers to go after allegedly infringing websites.

According to TechDirt’s Glyn Moody, however, informal deals struck between governments and corporations could be just as harmful — and the British government is currently engaged in just such an effort.

Moody, the author of Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, writes that “with the implicit threat that tough legislation will be brought in if voluntary agreements aren’t drawn up promptly enough, governments are using this technique to avoid even the minimal scrutiny that consultations on proposed new laws would permit.”

He points to a post by James Firth which reveals that “the UK government and in particular Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and the Creative Industries, is pressuring search engines to police search results in a way that goes well beyond notice and take-down.”

What the British government is after amounts to the artificial promotion of “approved” online music and film services, combined with a blacklist of websites accused of infringement which would be completely excluded from search results.

As Moody notes, a system of this sort could easily lead to the censorship of a great deal of legitimate content with no oversight or appeal. So far, the search engine companies appear reluctant to go along with doctoring search results to favor a single industry’s economic interests, especially since it could lead them to incur charges of colluding in anti-competitive behavior. However, they may be willing to go along with an advertising blacklist, which would be less extreme but no less high-handed.

“Legislation, with full consultation from all parties, is a far better way of proceeding,” Moody concludes. “After all, it’s why we have a legislative process with checks and balances in the first place — to craft a solution that is both workable and fair. The new fashion for backroom agreements among a small group of unelected insiders is nothing less than an attack on that process, and hence on democracy itself.”

Reid Sneaks SOPA Back Into Senate With New Name

Posted by Alexander Higgins - February 8, 2012
Alexander Higgins Blog

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is re-branding SOPA and the Protect IP act under a new name to launch a second round of attacks in an attempt to censor the Internet.

After trying to adopt Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), both pieces of legislation turned out to be a disaster, causing outrage among Internet giants and ordinary users alike. Congress had to retreat. However it’s determined to get what it wants this time.

After the shelving of SOPA and PIPA back in January Reid stated,“There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved.”

As RT reported last month, Senator Reid added that lawmakers will “continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between protecting Americans’ intellectual property, and maintaining openness and innovation on the Internet.”

The vote on the anti-piracy legislation was postponed from its January 24 date after Wikipedia and other popular websites went dark to protest the draft law.

Now the battle for online freedom continues.

The rebuttal to push Internet-regulating legislation has transformed into a new cybersecurity bill. The particulars of the latest attempt by senators to censor the Internet have not been disclosed to the public.

However some leaks suggest that the bill will grant the authority to crack down on the Internet to the executive branch of power, namely the White House. It looks highly possible taking into consideration that the legislation has to come out of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, chaired by Connecticut Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman.

The same Lieberman who earlier co-sponsored the so called Kill Switch bill that could allow the president of the United States to “declare a cybersecurity emergency,” and practically shut down the Internet.

After outrage from Internet advocacy groups, Kill Switch never made it in the Senate. This time it may be back under a new name.

How Hollywood’s Own Reality Undermines Its Position on Internet Policy

Credibility Lost

by RICHARD FORNO

The furor over the latest legislative proposals to address online copyright infringement in the United States have cast the major American intellectual property companies – most notably, the entertainment industry — in a very negative light within the global Internet user community.  I join with technologists, scholars, and industry observers who are amazed at the level of concentrated outcry over a single technology policy issue and hope it represents a more civic-minded Internet population when it comes to matters affecting Internet users both in the United States and around the world.

Much of the controversy surrounding The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) [1] and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) [2] pertains to how they were drafted and their potential adverse consequences to the Internet itself, if not society generally. While a prolonged analysis or description of these proposals are beyond the scope of this article – but can be found quite easily online – they represent the latest attempts by the intellectual property (IP) industry (although ‘cartel’ might be a  more appropriate term) to further extend its reach into cyberspace to enact what it believes are necessary measures to protect its copyrighted property such as movies, music, and software.  Unfortunately, these legislative proposals were conceived and developed primarily by industry lobbyists with little input from Internet engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, or other subject matter experts who understand the technical, legal, and social consequences should these proposals, as written, become law.  The secrecy surrounding the drafting of SOPA and PIPA are reminiscent of how these same industry organisations were adamant that the international  development of 2011′s controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) occur in secret with little if any public consultation, comment, or discussion.[3]

Apparently, developing laws to protect intellectual property on the Internet are exempt from Washington’s alleged desire for greater transparency in the policymaking process. It also represents a shift in how technology issues previously were dealt with in the earlier days of the Internet — i.e., involving all stakeholders in a public forum to reach a mutual consensus on a given matter.  Such one-sided practices can lead to proposals like SOPA and PIPA, which indeed may endanger the effective and secure operation of the Internet, harm innocent Internet users, establish a “shoot first” policy based on accusation not proof, and potentially present assorted constitutional concerns over due process and online freedom of expression.  [4]

Concerns over the technical and legal ramifications of SOPA and PIPA were voiced publicly by companies like Google and Facebook and a veritable Who’s Who of Internet Engineering[5]. These concerns subsequently were marginalised or ignored[6] by American legislators wanting to enact them into law quickly while minimising public discussion about their potential consequences.  In response, the Great SOPA Blackout of January 18^th, 2012 was launched by major Internet companies, prominent Web sites, and individual luminaries to protest and raise public awareness of these proposals, building upon the successful online protest the prior month against Internet company GoDaddy.Com, a longtime SOPA supporter.[7]  The significant public attention brought to these proposals during the January 18^th Blackout forced legislators to realise these proposals might be a political problem for them; even before the one-day protest ended, politicians began scrambling to distance themselves from these proposals, including several of their original sponsors.[8][9][10]  Political support turned so quickly against SOPA and PIPA that the president of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) publicly threatened to cut off campaign support for politicians who didn’t support its legislative desires once it was known that Congressional leaders and the Obama Administration had removed those proposals from active consideration in their current form.[11]

That said, the enforcement of copyright on the Net is an ongoing concern for Hollywood and represents an significant, if not apocalyptic, problem to the entertainment industry, as evidenced in recent years:

• 2005: MPAA claims $6.1 billion in losses due to “continued camcordering” of movies in theaters. [12]

• 2005: US Chamber of Commerce reports 750,000 jobs lost due to online ‘piracy.’[13]

• 2006:  A study based on Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) data from the Institute for Policy Innovation claims the US economy loses $20.5 billon a year from movie ‘piracy.’[14]

• 2011: In a letter to the New York Times, the US Chamber of Commerce’s Mark Elliot says online ‘piracy’ threatens more than 19 million American jobs.[15]

Clearly, the entertainment industry is suffering tremendous financial losses due to online theft.  More frightening, the potential job losses have increased from 750,000 in 2005 to more than 19 million in 2011. This stark news suggests there must be severe financial and employment losses for the entertainment industry resulting from the online ‘piracy’ of its products. These statistics and predictions must be true — after all, these are ‘industry numbers’ being reported!

Interestingly, despite this gloomy news, the MPAA reported that “global box office receipts reached an all time high” of $29.9 billion in 2010 — and soon after announced new statistics showing how movie ‘piracy’ is killing its industry and destroying jobs. [16]

MPAA can’t have it both ways. Either it is losing money and laying people off due to ‘piracy’ or it’s making profits hand-over-fist and keeping its industry very much alive and profitable. Either way, it’s offered up some very misleading statements about its profitability and well-being in the face of an alleged epidemic of online theft that only draconian measures like SOPA or PIPA can address.

Similar antics were used by the MPAA’s musical counterpart, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) over the years to describe its alleged financial woes due to online theft.  In the case of music, iTunes destroyed the decades-old concept of “album sales” — yet recording industry statements and news articles continued to suggest that “declining album sales” was a direct consequence of the online ‘piracy’ problem rather than acknowledging that increasing number of customers now purchased individual tracks from iTunes instead of full albums. [17][18]

Nevertheless, these manipulated statistics are invoked by the entertainment industry at every opportunity to justify and perpetuate attacks on technology, customers, and the Internet itself while ignoring societal evolution and the evolving expectations of its customers.  I do not dispute that the theft of copyrighted materials on the Internet is a problem and needs to be addressed, but we must be mindful of the statistics presented by the entertainment industry on this issue and not blindly accept their view as reflective of reality. Unfortunately, like all pieces of propaganda, repeat it often enough and the audience will believe it’s true.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.”  So let’s dig a bit deeper into the statistics routinely cited by the entertainment industry as it plays the victim of ‘piracy’ in the eyes of legislators and the media to determine if these indeed are facts or merely fantasy:

• 2010: The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) releases a study that, while confirming online copyright infringement indeed is a problem, cast serious doubts on the intellectual property industry’s ‘piracy’ statistics. It also concludes that measuring the impact of ‘piracy’ with any degree of meaningful accuracy may be impossible.[19]

• 2011: A ‘piracy investigator’ working for the entertainment industry describes how the entertainment industry worked to boost its piracy statistics to gain stronger media and political interest in its efforts.[20]

• 2012: Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute notes that the statistics associated with online ‘piracy’ are flawed if not something purely in the fantasies of lobbyists and their paid-for legislators.[21]

In short, great doubts are, and should be, cast upon the statistics used by the entertainment industry regarding ‘piracy’ and the theft of its products.  Therefore, in negotiating with the entertainment industry, lawmakers must be prudently critical in their analysis and due diligence of the facts presented — or, as the late Ronald Reagan famously said, “trust, but verify.”

Sadly, these very metrics, flawed or fixed as they are, continue to define the entertainment industry’s vision of reality and are used by its Congressional lobbyists to garner support for more far-reaching mechanisms to control the flow of information — theirs or anyone else’s — on the Internet in the name of countering ‘piracy.’  After all, the flurry of widespread public criticism of SOPA was dismissed by lead SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith as “not based in reality”; in other words, the reality conveniently contrived by the entertainment industry lobbyists and subsequently believed as absolute truth by Congress.[22]  Such sentiment, if not simply an excessive sense of self-entitlement, also helps explain why members of the entertainment industry have sued foreign governments that do not enact legislation favourable to them immediately upon request.[23]

Therefore, how can anyone take seriously the claims of Hollywood over its declared losses to ‘piracy’?  Not only do the entertainment industry’s statements about ‘piracy’s’ debilitating effects on its profitability conflict with its proclamations about strong annual sales, but it’s been caught basing its actions on a misconstrued sense of reality and groupthink reinforced by an ongoing inability to work with those whose views differ or raise concerns about its agenda. But Congressional lawmakers routinely believe the entertainment industry’s claims and cater to its needs, because they appreciate the flow of money received by enacting legislation favourable to those supporting their political campaigns. [24]

Interestingly, either through a superb act of irony or willful ignorance, the entertainment industry (and Congress) fails to note that the very technologies it lobbies (or votes) against are the ones that continue to make it so profitable over time.  Technological innovations such as the VCR, DVR, iTunes, NetFlix, and yet-to-be-discovered (or invented) services all contribute to the long-term success of the entertainment industry by allowing customers to enjoy entertainment products in a manner conducive to and consistent with the modern age and societal expectations.  For example, the launch of iTunes as the de facto Internet site to purchase music was a direct response to the rampant theft of music over the Internet in the late 1990s when Napster, GnuTella, Limewire, and other services met an emerging customer need (portabilityof a purchased music to multiple devices and over the Internet) that the recording industry chose to ignore. iTunes transformed that mostly criminal venture – obtaining and sharing music over the Internet – into the recording industry’s standard, if not preferred, method of distributing commercial music to customers.

Unfortunately. any new technology in the hands of average customers absolutely terrifies the entertainment industry. An insane fear of ‘piracy’ and zealous desire to protect its digital products at all costs have contributed to the imposition of restrictive technology controls, laws, and legislative proposals that created the uproar we see currently over SOPA and PIPA. Similar efforts over time explain why customers couldn’t easily duplicate VHS tapes in the 1980s, or DVDs in the 1990s, and are forced to watch un-skippable FBI “Anti Piracy Warnings” on DVDs and Blu-Rays in the 2000s.  It’s why you hear terms like ‘safe harbour’, ‘circumvention’, HDMI, HDCP, DRM, TCP, CSS, TPM, ‘analog holes’, ‘broadcast flags’, and things called ‘content protection’ inflicted upon our computers, monitors, video cards, iPods, cell phones, home theater systems, movies, music, and other digital products we might place on our various ‘authorised devices.’ It’s why since 2005 you risk arrest on federal felony charges if you take a photos or quick movie clips of a relative in a movie theater and happen to also catch a film playing in the background.[25] Why? Because you might be a criminal looking to steal digital content.  Even if you’re not, you might be. But that chance that you might be a criminal means everyone must be considered and treated as one, too — and why every new piece of consumer technology is considered by the entertainment industry as a potential Weapon of Mass Infringement. [26]   Remember that in 1982 the former MPAA president famously equated the VCR to the Boston Strangler [27] in terms of endangering the future success of the film industry; yet despite the proliferation of VCRs, DVRs, and streaming video services in the years since, that same industry reported record profits in 2010!

Effectively working together to counter online copyright infringement requires trust — trust in the data presented, and trust in the trustworthiness of those you are working with. Sadly, the entertainment industry repeatedly demonstrates it is not to be trusted — and the flawed statistics endlessly cited to further its agenda confirms this belief, as does its repeated inability to work with people and groups whose views differ from their own.  Those working to develop lasting solutions to the very real problem of contemporary copyright infringement must strive towards a mutually acceptable resolution to this problem and realise that a winner-take-all scorched-earth outcome may not be an appropriate solution. Legislation and treaties regarding copyright enforcement that raise serious concerns about Internet security, stability, and constitutionality (i.e., SOPA, PIPA, ACTA) must not be developed in secret by a committee of selected lobbyists but rather in full view of the public and with input from qualified external subject matter experts representing all sides of the issue.  Finally, to reach such a solution, the entertainment industry must abolish its practice of treating its paying customers as potential criminals and overcome its paranoia about technologies that it doesn’t yet control or influence heavily[28][29].

Unlike Silicon Valley, Hollywood considers ‘innovation’ as the process of lobbying for newer and more stringent controls over information and the flow of information in modern society. By clinging to its own version of reality, the entertainment industry demonstrates that it prefers to inflict lasting damage on the rest of the world to protect its antiquated Industrial Age business models rather than evolve with the modern world and so-called Information Age. Moreover, I posit that the entertainment industry’s ongoing and frequently controversial efforts to deal with what it purports to be an apocalyptic threat of ‘piracy’ merely are attempts to justify its legitimacy and self-perceived relevance in a world where the capabilities of quality production, marketing, and distribution of entertainment and other digital products now exist in the hands of Every Man[30][31] and not exclusively One Man[32][33].

Sources.[1] http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261[2] http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/text[3] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/report-acta-secrecy-is-all-the-united-states-fault.ars[4] https://www.eff.org/document/law-professors-letter-sopa[5] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-sopa-and-pipa[6] http://www.gamepolitics.com/2012/01/04/smith-says-reddit-sopa-protestors-are-039not-legitimate-or-large-number039 [7] http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57349913-281/godaddy-bows-to-boycott-now-opposes-sopa-copyright-bill/[8] http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71697.html[9] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57362990-501465/sopa-is-dead-smith-pulls-bill/[10]  http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/harry-reid-pipa-sopa-mpaa-blackout-283549[11] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120120/14472117492/mpaa-directly-publicly-threatens-politicians-who-arent-corrupt-enough-to-stay-bought.shtml[12] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/pirates-of-the-canadians/article735563/singlepage/#articlecontent[13] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10213367-38.html[14] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5395218.stm[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/opinion/rogue-web-sites.html[16]http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/03/mpaa_box_office_bragging.html[17] http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/01/the-itunes-effect-and-the-futu.html[18]http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/02/news/companies/napster_music_industry/[19] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars(The GAO Report is @ http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-423)[20] http://torrentfreak.com/private-anti-piracy-investigator-spills-the-beans-111003/[21] http://www.itworld.com/security/242587/best-evidence-showing-we-need-sopa-based-govt-studies-never-existed[22] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120105/04462117287/rep-lamar-smith-decides-lying-about-insulting-dismissing-opposition-to-sopa-is-winning-strategy.shtml[23]http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120112/09203917388/insane-entitlement-emi-sues-irish-govt-not-passing-sopa-like-censorship-law.shtml[24] http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/205491-consumer-group-accuses-hollywood-of-threatening-politicians[25] http://consumerist.com/2009/12/charged-with-felony-after-taping-4-minutes-of-new-moon.html[26] http://www.mpaa.org/contentprotection/camcorder-laws[27] http://cryptome.org/hrcw-hear.htm[28] http://www.dvdforum.org/about-mission.htm[29] http://www.digital-cp.com/about_dcp[30] http://www.apple.com/[31] http://www.youtube.com/[32] http://www.riaa.com/[33] http://www.mpaa.org/

Hollywood threatens Obama over SOPA

RT - 20 January, 2012
If you see the White House invaded by aliens, blown up by laser beams or bombed by terrorists in any of the big summer blockbusters this year, consider it a subtle hint to the Oval Office by way of Hollywood.

After US President Barack Obama demanded revamped provisions in the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, Los Angeles film executives are rescinding their support of the commander-in-chief.

While Hollywood hot-shots were in the past major contributors to the 2008 campaign for Barack Obama, movie execs are heated up over the presidents halting of SOPA. On the West Coast, filmmakers and affiliated are insisting that the move is a major blow to the movie industry and it will only further encourage an Internet already ripe with pirated motion pictures.

Under the proposed SOPA legislation, both websites and Web surfers involved in sharing copyrighted material would be imposed with hefty fines and imprisonment, imposing a government-sanctioned firewall of sorts to shut down a large chunk of the Web. Advocates for an open Internet have protested in droves against both SOPA and its sister legislation, the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, and a massive campaign against them both on Wednesday this week brought thousands of websites down to show the impact the laws could have. Search engine giant Google warned users of the acts’ implications on Wednesday, and both Wikipedia and Reddit turned their sites black for the day. On Twitter, users used the microblogging sight to tweet opposition to SOPA and for a while the term “Save Porn” became the top trending topic in America, as passed legislation would no-doubt cripple the online adult entertainment industry.

Although Obama has won the favor of much of Silicon Valley by striking down SOPA for now, downstate in the Hollywood Hills, executives are furious that the president has put his foot down on the legislation, potentially allowing for the sharing and pirating of films to continue endlessly.

In Los Angeles, execs are fearful of the consequences and are revoking their support. For Obama’s re-election campaign, that could be one big dent in his 2012 fundraising efforts out west.

President Obama has managed to garner substantial support from the Internet and computer tech industry, although the Democratic National Committee has, as of September 30, 2011, received around $1 million more from the Hollywood and entertainment industry than their Silicon Valley counterparts. Among those that are at the top of the donor list are DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenerg, who personally has raised more than $500,000 for Obama’s re-election so far and has contributed $2 million to a super PAC with similar viewpoints.

If the backlash already aimed at Obama is any indication, however, the amount in the money well might begin to dry up.

“We just feel very let down by the administration and Obama for not supporting us,” one anonymous movie exec tells the Hollywood-geared website Deadline.

Another executive, who is identified only as a well known movie mogul and a supporter of the administration until now adds, “At least let him remain neutral and not go against it until we can get the legislation right. But Obama went against it. I’m personally not going to support him anymore and not give a dime anymore.”

With Hollywood funding not just Obama but the Democrats as a whole, a rift is dividing the president’s own party as lawmakers are forced to take sides with anti-SOPA supporters and the entertainment industry.

Former Democratic Senator Chris Dodd campaigned for Obama in 2008 but today heads the Motion Picture Association of America. He called the blackout on Wednesday waged by anti-SOPA advocates “the height of irresponsibility” when speaking to MSNBC and equated it to children screaming until they hold their breath.

Others within the Hollywood elite, including Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, have in the past donated large sums to the Obama campaign, which hosted three separate fundraisers at the Sony Pictures movie studio in Los Angeles before.

While 19 US Senators flipped their stance regarding SOPA on Wednesday alone and became opponents of the bill, the vast majority of them are Republicans.

Democrats, on the other hand, are largely in support of both SOPA and PIPA, with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) personally raking in almost one million dollars from supporters of the legislation. In a report published by the Raw Story on Thursday, the top 20 beneficiaries of special interest money in favor of PIPA doubles as a roster of some of the left’s biggest names, including Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Patrick Leahy, among others. In all, writes the website, the total amount of money handed over to the Democrats on the list of supporters of the act from special interests favoring SOPA amounts to more than $7 million. Anti-SOPA lobbyists, in comparison, have only contributed $807,502 to those very same Democrats.

“God knows how much money we’ve given to Obama and the Democrats and yet they’re not supporting our interests,” another anonymous Hollywood insider tells Deadline. “There’s been no greater supporters of him than we’ve been from the first day and the first fundraisers continuing until he was elected. We all were pleased. And, at its heart institutionally, Hollywood supports the Democrats. Now we need the administration to support us. This is a very important time for Hollywood.”

The Internet and computer industry has supported the Democratic Party to the tune of $52 million since 2007, which the Center for Responsive Politics says is up $12 million from the period of 2001 to 2006.

In regards to the week’s blackout, a senior Democratic congressional staffer close to the issue tells the National Journal, “Before this happened, the perception around here was that those who are in favor of ever-increasing copyright protections always won.” Because of Wednesday’s blackout, adds the staffer, “This may shift people’s expectations. It’s hard to say how much, but I think in a way that we haven’t seen in a long time. Folks on the Hill are realizing that there are a lot of people out there, and not just tech companies, that care about copyright issues.”

“This is something that could be repeated, but it couldn’t be repeated on just any issue. It resonates with people in having the freedom to go on the Internet and not be censored,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California and an opponent of the bills, adds.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

American Censorship: SOPA - The Internet Blacklist Bill

Strike Against Sopa!

sopastrike.com

Internet goes on strike — blackout everywhere. This Wed Jan 18, many of your favorites sites--including this one--will be unavailable to you to stop web censorship. Tell everyone, petition even more sites to join.--jef

Break In Case Of Censorship

What Are Our Free Speech Fail-safes If SOPA Passes?

by Joshua_Kopstein - motherboard.vice.com

As I’m writing this, Congress is getting ready to vote on the single most destructive piece of legislation that the internet has ever faced. SOPA, penned by a team of corporate shills who now have swell lobbyist jobs to show for it, is a bill aimed at combating online piracy in the worst conceivable way possible: By giving copyright holders and the government overreaching, due process-circumventing powers to shut down entire websites based on the mere suspicion that they might contain infringing material.

Worst of all, it’s already happening. Even before the bill has come to vote, censorship shenanigans have already been demonstrated by Universal, who fraudulently removed a music video by Will.i.am that voiced opposition to SOPA. Now, imagine what will happen when SOPA is in full-swing and all of YouTube is held liable for bogus copyright claims … or Etsy, or Flickr.

Of course that says nothing of the countless technologists who have warned SOPA’s China-style DNS blocking will seriously fuck up the internet in general, so it’s really not hyperbolic to say that this is the worst nightmare of a democratic and stable internet.

So the question on everyone’s mind right now is what kind of free speech fail-safes exist if and when SOPA (and its twin in the Senate, PROTECT-IP) passes? Although we can’t guarantee that they will be 100 percent legal, here are a couple of them:


THE IP ADDRESS TRICK (THE DIRTY WAY)

The first is an extremely simple and dirty hack: Because SOPA’s provisions call for the re-routing of DNS (the web’s addressing system that links browsers with the computer hosting a site), the websites will still be there — you just won’t be able to get to them via the usual “www dot com” method. If a site gets blocked, typing the IP address of the host directly (eg: 192.168.1.1) would connect you to that site. The downside: This creates a lot of security risks for the site in question. The fact that DNS exists in part to mask these addresses from the average user should tell you something.

THE WORLD TOR

Tor is what some would call a “darknet,” a network that runs under the radar of the normal internet and can only be accessed using special client software. By connecting to the Tor network, you are anonymizing and encrypting your browsing activity by making your IP address appear as that of a random node somewhere else on the network. And since that random node will typically be outside of the United States, you won’t be getting routed away from sites the copyright elite have deemed “infringing.”

It’s scary to think that Tor might become an option for some Americans, seeing as how it’s been previously used to subvert censorship in places like China and Syria. But even with web traffic fully anonymized and virtually untraceable, it’s not merely a “censorship off” button and there are risks involved if you don’t know what you’re doing. Additionally, securing the means of connecting to (and obtaining information about) the Tor network could become a lot more difficult for newcomers if Tor’s website gets blocked. And moreover, doing so would likely be illegal under SOPA on grounds that it is exists to subvert the filtering system being put in place.

The Bitcoin “Dimnet”

Dot.Bit is another hidden network similar to Tor but operating off a system of encrypted “tokens,” acquired in a way very much like Bitcoins, the decentralized digital currency system . Potentially a boon for sites that want to run outside the reach of the censor, Dot.Bit allows these tokens to be used in order to anonymously register domains under its network, which are accessed under the Top-level Domain (TLD) .bit

This seems like a great idea, but even .bit domains run the risk of being targeted under SOPA. If the law requires ISPs to block access, it would be a simple matter of cutting off the ports that those domains run on. And if those domains are involved in shady black market dealings like the rest of the Bitcoin network, they’ll have ample reason to do so.

All in all, the options are either incredibly obtuse, risky or likely to become illegal anyway. But one thing is for certain: SOPA and PROTECT-IP’s ‘killing spiders with a sledgehammer’ strategy isn’t going to smash piracy — it’s just going to make the internet a lot messier.

The Author of SOPA Is a Copyright Violator

By Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, Digg.com

 

US Congressman and poor-toupee-color-chooser Lamar Smith is the guy who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as I'm sure you know, is the shady bill that will introduce way harsher penalties for companies and individuals caught violating copyright laws online (including making the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime which you could actually go to jail for). If the bill passes, it will destroy the internet (for more info, go here).

I decided to check that everything on Lamar's official campaign website was copyright-cleared and on the level. Lamar is using several stock images on his site, two of which I tracked back to the same photographic agency. I contacted the agency to make sure he was paying to use them, but was told that it's very difficult for them to actually check to see if someone has permission to use their images. (Great news, copyright violators!) However, seeing as they're both from the same agency and are unwatermarked, it seems fairly likely that he is the only person on the entire internet who is actually paying to use a stock image (and he'd be an idiot not to).

So I took a look back at an archived, pre-SOPA version of his site.

This is a screenshot of his site as it appeared on the 24th of July, 2011.

And this is the background image Lamar was using. I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photographer who took it.

And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him.

I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organization, requesting permission to use it: "I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes.

"I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com."