Our new Senator, Chris Coons, made his way onto a list today, and it isn’t the list of independent thinkers. Today, in a Judiciary Committee meeting, the committee voted unanimously to approve the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). The act seems, at first blush, to be a good idea. The goal is to shut down websites that contain material that infringes on copyrighted material. However, as you dig into it a little deeper, as EFF.org has, you see that it does so much more.
EFF is deeply disappointed to report that the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the COICA Internet censorship bill this morning, despite bipartisan opposition, and countless experts pointing out how it would be ineffective, unconstitutional, bad for innovation and the tech economy, and would break the Internet.
Essentially, the bill would allow the AG to shut down entire sites by domain name if they are deemed to have infringement as their primary purpose. EFF points out that YouTube would likely have been killed in the cradle when users uploaded copyrighted material at a rate that YouTube couldn’t police.
In addition, the whole thing would encourage wholesale migration to alternative off-shore domain name service providers. Imagine a Firefox plugin that allows you to surf to sites that have been banned. It would be pretty easy, but it would increase the network load on the Internet backbone by an estimated 20%. In the process, it would probably end up moving even more jobs overseas as well.
Finally, the bill is a hammer that is being used to kill a fly. Whole website domain names could be impacted. Suppose there was a WordPress.com blog dedicated to finding places to download copyrighted music and films. Could the feds come in and whack the whole domain, killing thousands of blogs full of excellent content, just to kill a sub-site that is dedicated to doing bad things.
This is exactly the kind of thing that we laugh at countries like China and Turkey for. Turkey had, in fact, blocked WordPress because it hosted websites that talked about Turkish genocide of Armenians. There are already ways to deal with this. Lawsuits can be brought against the person responsible (I have been personally threatened with a lawsuit over this blog), the offending content can be deleted (as Google does now with videos, upon request).
I am very disappointed that Chris Coons’ first vote that gets coverage on DL is critical, but seriously Senator Coons, you’re better than this.