Growth of the Internet has transformed the American culture. Much of the fast pace of that transformation is the result of the fact that the Internet has been generally free of regulation and censorship.
News and information, on-line shopping, video streaming -- everywhere you look, there is a device or an application or a concept that even just a decade ago seemed to be the stuff of science fiction.
These developments must continue – but at the same time, there’s increasing evidence of a need to establish some rules of the road, particularly where issues like intellectual property are concerned. This is not a new issue.
The Founding Fathers thought the right to invent and create and to prosper as a result of those labors was sufficiently important, not just to individuals but to the growth of the new nation, that they wrote protections into the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, reads: "The Congress shall have Power . . . [t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The ability to copy digitally has permitted increasingly sophisticated forms of counterfeiting, and existing protections need to be updated. All over the world, websites provide counterfeit goods for sale, often masquerading as the real thing, ranging from computer software to movies to handbags to pharmaceuticals.
It’s at least a billion dollar industry, a billion dollar criminal enterprise that operates at the expense of hard-working, innovating, taxpaying Americans, costing the U.S. economy jobs and tax revenues that instead go into the pockets of criminals.
We must combat this international problem. This means breaking some new ground – which should only be done with careful consideration, respect for liberty, and adherence to our most cherished principles of governance.
Working on a bi-partisan basis, Congress has produced two bills – the PROTECT IP Act in the U.S. Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives – that will make web sites selling pirated goods inaccessible to U.S. users and make it harder to use the U.S. financial system to pay for the purchase of such goods.
There are those who are concerned that this proposed legislation would inhibit Internet freedom and that it poses a threat to liberty and the First Amendment, concerns which I believe are overstated. Liberty, the ability to maximize one’s talents free from interference with respect for the rights of others, is not the same as lawlessness, the state in which the Internet property pirates find themselves.
It is the function, indeed the obligation, of government to put an end to lawlessness, provided that it shows a decent respect for due process and the other constitutional protections we are all afforded.
Some suggest that the effort to fight Internet piracy is the equivalent of handing the government a giant “kill switch” for the First Amendment and for the Internet itself, claims that I believe to be overwrought. If there are parts of the bills that overreach or may lead to unintended consequences, they can be corrected as Rep. Lamar Smith, R-TX, has already done with his “manager’s amendment” to the House bill, scheduled to be marked up on Thursday.
The counter-arguments being made against the bills reaches too far into the arena of “maybes” and “what ifs” that, in the name of protecting liberty, will simply continue to give license to lawlessness.
Protecting copyrights is in fact a property rights issue. The opponents of the bill fail to distinguish between protected free speech and the outright theft of another's property. They are not the same thing. It's the difference between liberty and lawlessness. We are in favor of the former and opposed to the latter.
Colin Hanna is president of Let Freedom Ring, a Pennsylvania-based organization advocating for a constitutional approach to public policy making.
