The Toronto Star runs a special op-ed in which I discuss why I turned
my site dark for 12 hours yesterday. The article (Toronto
Star version, homepage
version)
reiterates how SOPA could be applied in Canada and emphasizes that if
the U.S. passes the legislation, it is very likely to pressure other
countries to do the same:
the U.S. intellectual property
strategy has long been premised on
exporting its rules to other countries, including Canada. The same
forces that have lobbied for SOPA and PIPA in the U.S. are the primary
lobbyists behind the digital lock provisions in Bill C-11 and the
recent submission to the U.S. government arguing that Canada should not
be admitted to the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations until it
complies with U.S. copyright demands.
SOPA virtually guarantees that this will continue. Not only is it
likely that the U.S. will begin to incorporate SOPA-like provisions
into its IP demands, but SOPA makes it a matter of U.S. law to ensure
that intellectual property protection is a significant component of
U.S. foreign policy and grants more resources to U.S. embassies around
the world to increase their involvement in foreign legal reform.
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Appeared
in the Toronto Star on January 19, 2012 as Michael Geist’s website went
dark to protest U.S. restrictions on Internet
Yesterday my website, michaelgeist.ca, went dark for 12 hours with
thousands of posts replaced by a single page warning against proposed
U.S. legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the
Protect IP Act (PIPA). My site was not alone as the online
protest included some of the Internet’s most popular sites including
Wikipedia, Craigslist, and Reddit. It is nice to be in good company,
but taking an academic site committed to open access to information
offline on a day when thousands came visiting anxious to learn more
copyright and the Internet was not a decision to take lightly.
My decision had little to do with the expectation that Canadians can
influence U.S. legislation since it is pretty clear they can’t.
Rather, there were four main reasons why I thought participation in the
“SOPA protests” was essential.
The first has to do with the substance of the proposed laws themselves,
which are designed to have an extra-territorial effect that manifests
itself particularly strongly in Canada. SOPA treats all dot-com,
dot-net, and dot-org domain as domestic domain names for U.S. law
purposes. Moreover, it defines "domestic Internet protocol addresses" -
the numeric strings that constitute the actual address of a website or
Internet connection - as "an Internet Protocol address for which the
corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a
judicial district of the United States."
Yet IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national
ones. The allocation entity located in the U.S. is called ARIN, the
American Registry for Internet Numbers. Its territory includes the
U.S., Canada, and 20 Caribbean nations. This bill treats all IP
addresses in this region as domestic for U.S. law purposes.
To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN
for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block
of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S.
bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.
Second, Canadian businesses and websites could easily find themselves
targeted by SOPA. The bill grants the U.S. "in rem" jurisdiction over
any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection.
For those sites, the U.S. grants jurisdiction over the property of the
site and opens the door to court orders requiring Internet providers to
block the site and Internet search engines to stop linking to it.
Third, millions of Canadians rely on the legitimate sites that are
affected by the legislation. Whether creating a Wikipedia entry,
posting a comment on Reddit, running a WordPress blog, participating in
an open source software project, or reading a posting on BoingBoing,
the lifeblood of the Internet is a direct target of SOPA. If Canadians
remain silent, they may ultimately find the sites and services they
rely upon silenced by this legislation.
Fourth, the U.S. intellectual property strategy has long been premised
on exporting its rules to other countries, including Canada. The same
forces that have lobbied for SOPA and PIPA in the U.S. are the primary
lobbyists behind the digital lock provisions in Bill C-11 and the
recent submission to the U.S. government arguing that Canada should not
be admitted to the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations until it
complies with U.S. copyright demands.
SOPA virtually guarantees that this will continue. Not only is it
likely that the U.S. will begin to incorporate SOPA-like provisions
into its IP demands, but SOPA makes it a matter of U.S. law to ensure
that intellectual property protection is a significant component of
U.S. foreign policy and grants more resources to U.S. embassies around
the world to increase their involvement in foreign legal reform.
Even if SOPA dies, the mounting battle over Internet restrictions seems
destined to continue. In the U.S., a son-of-SOPA is bound to appear
should the bill die, while in Canada, the government has remained
steadfast in supporting the Bill C-11 digital lock rules despite
widespread public opposition. For those concerned with Internet and
digital rights, more days of protest may lie ahead.
Michael Geist holds the Canada
Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of
Ottawa, Faculty of Law. He can reached at mgeist@uottawa.ca or online
at www.michaelgeist.ca.
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SOPA and PIPA may not be Canadian laws, but the protest associated with
them generated significant Canadian media coverage. On a remarkable day
that saw many U.S. politicians pull
their support for the legislation, Canadian coverage included:
I appeared on two CBC shows to discuss the developments:
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I've created a Storify
version that chronicles my tweets of the SOPA protest as I pointed
to articles and video of interest with a Canadian focus.
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Late last year, I wrote a column on
lawful access
arguing that "neither the government nor law enforcement has provided
credible evidence demonstrating how the current law has impeded active
investigations." Open Media has now obtained an internal
police document
that shows the policy recognize this problem. The email asks
police
departments for examples of why the current laws on disclosure of
customer name and address information has posed a problem. The
email
acknowledges that "we are aware that a similar request was made
approximately 2 years ago, but the report written at that time lacked a
sufficient quantity of good examples."
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