Lamar Smith and the Strange SOPA Sojourn

Image of Lamar Smith From His Facebook

While few people are under the impression that copyright law is healthily respected across the world wide web, it comes as some surprise to see SOPA, a.k.a. Stop Online Piracy Act, a.k.a. H.R. 3261, appear in its current form before the House of Representatives. Many internet users may have thought that programs that allowed for legit music sharing (Spotify), programs that allowed for fair use (Flickr's partnership with Creative Commons, for example) and more streaming options for television and films (Hulu, more) were all strong pathways to making pirating both less palatable and tempting. But to a bipartisan group of legislators, more drastic steps are needed to protect copyright.

The justification for SOPA is for it to put an end to “rogue sites,” described by bill sponsor the MPAA as those that “traffic in stolen movies, TV shows, and music or even counterfeit prescription medications and other goods. These sites are located throughout the world, and while they often look legitimate - featuring advertising from reputable companies, accepting major credit cards - they're really online havens for theft, enabling criminals to profit from content or intellectual property they had nothing to do with creating.”

While bill opponents Google, Facebook, and many others say they also have no love for rogue websites, they feel the bill goes too far, especially in regard to “Internet companies that act in good faith to remove infringing content from their sites.”

It may be argued that one of the biggest problems with SOPA is that it assumes all incorrect copyright use is done maliciously and needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Anti-SOPA activists Americancensorship.org claim that “Now the government and corporations could block any site, foreign or domestic, just for one infringing link.”

It took me exactly one second to think of a post on the Austinist that would set us in SOPA's path - a post I wrote about Gregory Isaacs that contained a link to a blog that hosted his In Person album. So there goes our local -ist, presumably.

While the zero-tolerance bill is (almost) laughably impossible with which to comply (as Vice discovered) to say nothing of the tendency of SOPA supporters to engage in real-life, not-even-on-the-internet copyright violations on the regular, doesn't mean the bill won't get passed in spite of it all.

So how did we get here? As it turns out, SOPA is home grown, authored by Representative Lamar Smith. Smith has held office since 1987, but before taking on SOPA he was most frequently concerned with immigration and aerospace. In the realm of the former, he was against even George Bush's ideas of reform, which would have included “a path to citizenship.”

In other words, Smith is a legislator who doesn't appear to take much stock in a “meet in the middle” approach - in his work, he has opposed granting citizenship to children born in the States from illegal immigrants, a step beyond what many conservative legislators might even consider fair game. Similarly, SOPA feels designed for a very high caliber of enforcement. Who SOPA will actually benefit remains unclear (again, not the MPAA and fellow sponsors, who regularly, accidentally, and hilariously flaunt copyright rules, and will thus presumably be subject to smackdowns), though the entirety of the internet as you know it seems destined to suffer if the bill is passed.

Most recently, SOPA has been stalled until legislators reach a “consensus”.