Stephan Kinsella, an American intellectual property lawyer and libertarian legal theorist, discusses the First Amendment violations of the Stop Internet Piracy Act.
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| All right. Hi, everybody. | |
| It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I have, I guess, the original Steph. | |
| I would be the Steph version B, the revision, the beta. | |
| This is Steph Kinsella, who's going to be talking to us about soap, if I understand this rightly, the need for more personal hygiene among libertarians. | |
| Did I get that correct? | |
| That is not what I prepared for today, Steph. | |
| So you haven't showered. That's what you're saying. | |
| Okay, so SOPA, I did some reading on it, and it seems alarming in a way that all these initiatives seem alarming. | |
| And the only way that I can see what is most alarming about it is, as usual, by what the government is saying it's never going to be used for. | |
| I mean, whatever the government says things are never going to be used for, I assume that's immediately what it's going to start being used for. | |
| But I wonder if you could go over some of that which you find most heinous and deleterious about this. | |
| Is it imminent, right? | |
| It's coming up for vote pretty soon? | |
| Well, it's been back in – I mean I just heard today or yesterday the most recent news about the status of this bill, which is apparently – it is now delayed until January. | |
| I mean last Friday it was – we were – everyone was worried it was going to be pushed through by the Republicans and I guess the Democrats too. | |
| And then they delayed it, and they said it was delayed until January. | |
| And then on Monday they said, well, we're going to take it up again on Wednesday, which is today. | |
| And then they finally said, no, we're going to delay until next year. | |
| So I think we have a little reprieve. | |
| But these guys are relentless. | |
| The big media, the music industry, the RIAA, the MPAA, the software industries… They are relentless in pressuring Congress to ratchet up the penalties for copyright infringement, and I don't think they're going to give up. | |
| So I think it's a matter of time. | |
| Maybe it will be watered down a little bit. | |
| Let me give you a little background on what's going on here. | |
| So as you know… I'm a strong opponent of copyright. | |
| I think it's basically a government grant of monopoly privilege, and it is inconsistent with human liberty and human rights. | |
| And in fact, I think there's a good argument that it's inconsistent with the First Amendment, with free speech rights, because it basically prevents you from publishing or saying certain things, and you could even argue that the copyright clause in the US Constitution Which was 1789 when the Constitution came out, was superseded by the Bill of Rights in 1791, two years later. | |
| And so if there's an inconsistency between free speech and the censorship that's wrought by copyright, then the later provision would have to… That's an argument that I haven't heard many people take up, but I do think you could argue that. | |
| Most people think that the copyright clause is legitimate and the free speech clause is legitimate, and they recognize there's a tension, so they say we have to balance these things. | |
| So you have this unprincipled approach, which you and I here are. | |
| All the time that, well, the government – the courts have to balance these interests or the courts have to balance these interests. | |
| So we have to balance the incentive of copyright and the creativity that it inspires allegedly with free speech rights, and so there's a balancing effect. | |
| So we've had copyright for a long time, and there is a tension. | |
| And then in the 90s, this thing called the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was passed. | |
| Which was a ratcheting up of the power of copyright in the digital age. | |
| Luckily, at the time, the proponents of this, I think, did not realize the effect of the safe harbor provisions that some of the opponents insisted be put in because it basically allowed the internet to flourish. | |
| If those safe harbor provisions had not been put in, the internet may not have taken off. | |
| There may not have been a YouTube. | |
| There may never have been a Twitter. | |
| There may never have been a Facebook. | |
| The safe harbor provision basically shields It's like you wouldn't sue the road maker for a bad driver. | |
| Exactly. So this safe harbor provision is why we have now this kind of arcane system of DMCA takedown notices, which is still not the best system, but at least it's a procedure. | |
| There's some due process. | |
| There's some understanding of what's going on. | |
| It can be abused, and it is still being abused. | |
| In fact, it is abused regularly because if you… Get a site taken down with a DMCA takedown notice, and you're wrong about the copyright claim. | |
| There's really not much that the victim of this can do if their video or their media or blog is shut down. | |
| But at least there is some system. | |
| But instead of trying to fix the problems with this DMCA, they're adding yet another layer on. | |
| So a couple of years ago… Psychic charlatan from the 1970s was on the Tonight Show and was pretty much humiliated by having all his tricks exposed by Johnny Carson and he actually asked for this stuff to be taken down though he has no copyright holdings over and the site owners agreed and that's just because you know who's going to stand on principle and face years of this sort of back and forth. | |
| And this is exactly what happens. | |
| Yeah, legally he actually had no right because he probably signed a waiver, and there's a – I mean if you film someone, the copyright is in the person who films it, not the person being filmed. | |
| But basically if you threaten to sue someone, then they know that they – There's a chance they might be liable, and if they just respond the way the DMC says they should respond, then they have the safe harbor of liability protection. | |
| So they take it out of risk aversion, and a lot of times these things – so the other side can respond with a response. | |
| But if your response is fair use, which it often is, like, well, yeah, technically this looks like it's a use of someone's copyrighted material, but I have a fair use claim. | |
| Well, fair use is one of these nebulous, vague things that has to be decided by a court usually. | |
| And so the ISP or the YouTube is going to just say, well, how do I know if it's fair use or not? | |
| Because I want to keep my safe harbor. | |
| I want to keep my limitation of liability. | |
| So it tends to cause them to have a hair trigger and side with the rights holders, the copyright holders. | |
| So you're exactly right about that. | |
| All right. So, you're saying that they're adding more layers on at the moment. | |
| So, of course, like all laws, they just grow in this sediment. | |
| It's like stalagmites. They just grow and grow. | |
| So, they don't sweep away and start with a clean slate. | |
| Is this being layered on top of the Millennium Act? | |
| Yes, lay it on top of that and some recent acts which penalized streaming. | |
| But basically about two or three years ago, there was an act called the Pro-IP Act, which they tried, and they didn't quite succeed. | |
| And then it was succeeded by one called the COICA, Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act, COICA. And then COICA went down to defeat about a year ago, and now we have Son of COICA, which is PIPA. We call it Son of COICA. The PIPA Protect IP Act in the House, and the Senate version is called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. | |
| So basically all these laws are an attempt to enforce copyright in the form of stopping piracy, which they refer to using information and copying information. | |
| On the internet as piracy. | |
| And you have attention here because you have the internet, which is the world's greatest copying machine. | |
| And once the ideas get out there, information gets out there, it's not going to be not copied and not used. | |
| And you have the idea of copyright, which is to stop people… From copying, learning, imitating, emulating, remixing, and using and learning from others. | |
| So of course you have attention, and it's like the drug war stuff because you cannot stop people from doing this, especially with the increasingly sophisticated encryption techniques people have and bit torrenting techniques and these kinds of things. | |
| So you have to escalate and ratchet up the penalties just like the drug war. | |
| I mean life in prison or even execution for fairly minor… I think we're good to go. | |
| I think we're good to go. | |
| I mean he's in jail for a year even though the movie made $273 million and it's just insane and it's only going to get worse if SOPA passes. | |
| Well, and of course there's – I mean there are three categories of people covered by most laws. | |
| There are the people who would never do it and don't even know what it is, and they're not going to be affected. | |
| There are people sort of in the middle who have a vague idea, oh, I'm watching something on YouTube, I don't know, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, or I'm uploading something, a mash-up or something like that. | |
| And those people will probably be scared off. | |
| But, of course, the reality is just like the drug war, the hardcore people are only going to find it more valuable to provide whatever service when there's more restriction on what they can provide, the value of what they can provide go up, just like the drug war, like any other thing. | |
| And, of course, those people are just going to move their stuff offshore. | |
| They're going to put encryptions. | |
| What they're doing is they're guaranteeing the emergence of permanent pirate communities. | |
| Wouldn't you say that's fair? | |
| A hundred percent true. | |
| In fact, I read just today about a new – excuse me – a new Firefox add-in called DSOPA, which is already out there, and it is ready to go into effect as soon as SOPA comes into effect. | |
| What it will do is if – see, one of the bad things SOPA will do is it will basically allow – well, there's different versions of it, but it will allow the attorney general or private citizens in some versions of the law to – Get a site shut down. | |
| In other words, a private citizen or the attorney general can either send a letter with this sort of safe harbor threat that we talked about, something like that, or go through the court, but a court that doesn't invite the other party. | |
| So it's ex parte, we call it. | |
| So in other words, it's not adversarial. | |
| There's no due process. It's basically a unilateral order to a third party like Google or YouTube telling them you have to – Not give a link anymore to this website or to all the parts of the infrastructure of the internet that give the DNS names. | |
| You have to remove this from your database, so they will literally break the internet's DNS protocol. | |
| So if you type in freedomainradio.com, that's a text… That maps onto this IP address. | |
| No one knows your IP address. | |
| You probably don't even know it. | |
| But there's a DNS that maps it to that. | |
| Well, if the government comes in and breaks that mapping, people can't find you anymore. | |
| So there's this program called DSOPA, and what it will do is it will just… If you type in free domain radio and Firefox can't find it because it can detect that the government has had it taken down, it will just go to this database in Europe somewhere or somewhere out of the seas, find the right mapping address, and take you right to it. | |
| And of course the pirates and the – even the real terrorists, people like this, they're going to easily find a way around this stuff. | |
| So it's only going to inconvenience law-abiding citizens, and it's only going to give more and more tools to the state to – Hold over people's heads as a threat that, you know, here's yet another law you've broken, so cooperate with us on this or whatever. | |
| So I agree 100% with you. | |
| Well, and I think there's an add-in for Firefox called Mafia Fire or something like that, where sites that have been taken down, you get redirected to backup sites. | |
| I mean, it's the WikiLeaks thing, right? | |
| It's like these people, they learn nothing, right? | |
| And I guess, do you think it's being driven by... | |
| What always sort of strikes me about piracy issues or questions is that people say... | |
| We've had 3 million illegal downloads of our movies. | |
| So at $10 a movie, that's $30 million in lost revenue, which to me is just a completely insane calculation because it's to assume that if the people weren't able to download it, they would have immediately bought it. | |
| And that just doesn't seem to me to be the case at all. | |
| I don't know if any studies have been done on that. | |
| But I know that in England, they found that people who downloaded spent more on money than people who didn't download. | |
| And it's a way of sampling or previewing music. | |
| And then you go out and you buy the album or even support the artist however you like. | |
| I mean, I think it was Coldplay who released their last album on a sort of pay-what-you-want basis. | |
| But it seems like there's just this real old-school mentality that people are stealing from us and we've just got to close the gates. | |
| And that just seems – I don't know if it's old school or people over – I have to say over 50 now. | |
| I can't say over 40 because I'm over 40. | |
| But where do you think the mentality is coming from that it's really driving this? | |
| Is it merely punitive? Is there fantasy of riches if it goes through or what's driving it? | |
| I think it's a combination. | |
| It's an intersection of a lot of different trends here. | |
| On the average person's side, they've been sort of taught this idea that property rights are good and, of course, other types of IP or property rights are good, like intellectual property. | |
| So they... They hear piracy, and so the problem is in this debate, even most of the opponents of SOPA will – they will concede the ground. | |
| They will say, well, we admit that piracy is a problem, but this isn't the right solution. | |
| Well, once they say that, in my opinion, they've lost the argument because once you admit that there's a right being violated – I mean sure there are costs to different enforcement measures, but you can't really object to them on principle grounds. | |
| It may cost too much, but we have to ratchet up the – if there's theft going on, we have to try to stop it. | |
| So I think that the average person has been basically brainwashed or propagandized with this false idea that – Intellectual property is a type of property. | |
| Now, on the side of the MPAA and the RIAA, they're just trying to hold on to a dying business model and extract every bit of profit that they can out of it. | |
| If you read back in the history, every time there's a technical – They freaked out. | |
| They freaked out about LPs. | |
| They thought it would ruin live performances. | |
| They freaked out about radio. They freaked out about live television broadcasts. | |
| They freaked out about the VCRs, you remember. | |
| They freaked out about CDs, digital audio tapes. | |
| They freak out every time and every generation. | |
| Their profits get… Get better and better. | |
| And there have been studies even recently showing that the pirates – people that tend to pirate are the ones that buy even more. | |
| And even if you could show that someone's profit is less than it would be absent absolute ironclad fascist monopoly enforced by a strong state, well, I mean are they really entitled to that? | |
| This guy, Louis C.K., this popular U.S. comedian, the other day released his comedy tour video on his own website for $5 DRM free, and he said, I know people can pirate this and torrent it, but here it is for you. | |
| Do what you want with it. And he said, it cost me $30,000 to have the video made and $200,000 to produce the show, and I'm hoping to make enough. | |
| He made like a million dollars in about seven days. | |
| I'm just going to cry for a moment just to say, hey, podcaster, but I'll be fine. | |
| Let me just get a Kleenex here. | |
| No. I mean maybe he would have made $2 million if he had done the regular deal, and the studio would have made $3 million on top of it, and the consumers would have paid $19.99 and couldn't have used it on their iPod. | |
| They could use it on one device and had to pay for it twice sometimes. | |
| It was a win-win for everyone except for the middle band, these copyright-entrenched companies. | |
| Studios and media industries. | |
| So yeah, I agree. | |
| I think that piracy is – of course, the most recent example was just a couple days ago. | |
| The new Batman movies coming out next July, Batman Rising or something like that, The Dark Knight Rises. | |
| And their – Warner Brothers or whoever is showing the trailer in the theaters now before movies. | |
| And someone pirated the trailer, and then they put that on their website. | |
| And Warner Brothers sent a takedown threatening to put the guy in jail who just had a link to it on his website because some of these laws actually criminalize a link because you're providing an access tool, they call it. | |
| And the circle will make this even worse. | |
| And what makes no sense is that no one is going to pay for a trailer. | |
| I mean this is advertising the movie. | |
| It makes no sense whatsoever. So I think it's a dinosaur mentality, Steph, that these guys have. | |
| Well, my guess is that they're probably getting some concessions out of the movie theaters in return for the trailer and they feel that that may cause – I don't know. | |
| But if you go into the movie, you're going to see the trailer anyway. | |
| I mean I think art should be – one of my first jobs was as a waiter where I lived on tips. | |
| And now, 30 years later, I find myself once more – Living on tips. | |
| But it works. | |
| I mean, it's the weird thing. It works in restaurants and it works for podcasting. | |
| It's a $300 billion a year economy is freeware or freemium as they call it, right? | |
| Free plus premium. And, I mean, my belief is that art should be, I mean, artists should be waiters. | |
| And we all start out as waiters anyway, all the actors and artists and all that. | |
| But it should be a tipping base. | |
| You should receive the value for free and then tip. | |
| And I tell people that that works. | |
| I can tell you that it works. It works better than charging people for stuff. | |
| But it's a hard thing to let go of. | |
| I had to let go of a couple of years ago. | |
| I just let all my books go out for free. | |
| And it's just a hard thing to do because you grow up with that mentality. | |
| And... It's hard for people to change that. | |
| And people understand that if they like something and want more of it, they've got to throw some coin at it. | |
| I mean everybody gets that much. | |
| I think there's some of that too. | |
| And I also think that when we stop being so reliant upon the business models that have grown up around the assumption that there's copyright and copyright enforcement, people will become even more creative. | |
| So for example, let's say J.K. Rowling who wrote the seven Harry Potter books. | |
| Now, I don't know if in a copyright-free world she would be the second or richest woman in Britain, but I don't know if she would be worth 100 million pounds or 100 million pounds, but she could have easily gotten an audience with the first two or three books. | |
| And she could have found a way to say, listen, I've got number four, five, six, and seven written. | |
| I'll release them when I get pledges from a million subscribers. | |
| And then I will agree to endorse the first guy who makes a movie that pays me a fee to consult on the movie, and this will be the official movie. | |
| There's ways you can profit from your reputation and your association with what you've created. | |
| Right. And also, I mean, all of this stuff arose at a time, like these ideas arose at a time where if you consume something for free and then you wanted to donate to the author, you had to write out a check, you had to get a stamp and, you know, go down to the post office. | |
| And it was quite arduous to give people money for value received. | |
| But now, I mean, it's like two clicks, you know, and half a cigarette and you're done. | |
| And so I think that, you know, the sort of click to donate, click to pay, click to whatever, has made it so much easier for people to do that that the barrier to donations is much lower. | |
| Yeah, I agree. And especially, I mean, if you don't go with the business model that the early movie and music industry did where we had DRM and all this stuff, just release it DRM-free. | |
| And, you know, people are going to pirate it anyway. | |
| So just give it to consumers the way they want it. | |
| These are the guys that are actually paying you. | |
| Why do you want to alienate the people and basically threaten to sue them and say, am I giving you ownership of this? | |
| I'm just giving you a license. And if you duplicate it and show your friends and show it on a television that's bigger than 55 inches – I mean you've heard about these stories about the NFL threatened to sue these churches that were showing the Super Bowl for their churches because the televisions were greater than 55 inches in diagonal length. | |
| Because, I mean, literally, there's some statute or some regulation that says 55 is as much as you can go. | |
| I mean, it's crazy. | |
| Well, and I mean, those guys, they place an unwanted tax of about 100 bucks a year on every US subscriber, even if they don't watch. | |
| I mean, they're just a bunch of predatory maniacs in the sports world. | |
| Yeah, and I think in Canada you have something similar with like – I remember when digital audio tapes came out. | |
| I think the Canadian government slapped a tax on every blank tape based upon the idea that a certain percentage of these will be used to siphon away what could be sold normally with CDs. | |
| At least here, we're not there yet. | |
| We're not – that's like a type of prior restrainer. | |
| Like we're assuming – Well, listen to that. | |
| I mean, it's continued into the digital age. | |
| So, of course, in Canada, what they've done is they've slapped a tax on every form of media that can store MP3s or videos. | |
| Of course, the artists all went to the government and said, oh, we're losing so much money. | |
| Of course, they get grants from the government, but let's leave that aside. | |
| They say, oh, we're losing so much money, and so you need to tax all this media. | |
| And then you need to put that into a fund, which then gets paid out to artists on some ridiculous calculated basis. | |
| Right. | |
| you can now download everything that you want right you're the floodgates have opened because you're paying this tax and that is now carte blanche to download and copy and you've paid so go to town right that might be a better solution if they really would let you do that but i have a feeling they're going to crack down on the other i mean i think they're actually trying to really ratchet up canadian copyright law as we speak the conservative the conservative government there um i | |
| You may be familiar with this, but there is – there have even been some allegedly libertarian and free market economist types in the US… Because they buy into this mentality of intellectual property, at least the utilitarian idea that we need to have the government grant these – in other words, we're going to have an underproduction of – Artistic works, novels, movies, creative works, and inventions if the government doesn't come in and solve this horrible market failure of the free market. | |
| And then they say, well, we agree that there are problems with the copyright law. | |
| We agree there are problems with the patent law. | |
| So some of these guys have said, well, let's augment or replace the copyright and patent systems with a system where the government takes taxpayer dollars, gives it to a panel of experts. | |
| Appointed by the government, of course, who doles out rewards at the end of the year or at the end of each season of measuring people's output. | |
| So people will come to this panel and say, hey, I just wrote a novel. | |
| Isn't it great? I think I deserve $100,000. | |
| Or I just came up with a new mousetrap. | |
| I think it's really cool. | |
| I think I deserve a million dollars because, after all, I spent $900,000 in my garage over the last 17 years tinkering with it, so I've got to recoup my cost, right? | |
| I mean literally, one of them proposed a $30 billion fund for artistic works. | |
| Another proposed $80 billion just for medical innovations. | |
| Now, that's just medical. | |
| Now, if you imagine the different fields of technology that patents cover, medical is just one narrow slice of it. | |
| So if you extrapolate outwards… We're talking $1, $2, $3, $10, $20 trillion a year that these guys have in mind as a system to incentivize innovation and creativity because they have fallen prey to this crazy idea that there's basically market failure, that without the state, we don't have enough innovation. | |
| Yeah, because everybody knows that bureaucrats who have no interest in the profitability or loss of an item are much better at judging its business value than entrepreneurs or investors who actually have their own money in the game. | |
| It's insane. But they believe in the public goods problem. | |
| They believe in market failure. | |
| And so they have no really intellectual defense against the argument that, well, we can always have more. | |
| I mean, we don't have enough innovation right now. | |
| We have an underproduction of innovation on the market. | |
| I'd like to ask you a theoretical question. | |
| I don't think there's any way to prove or disprove it, but it seems like there's an alignment of interest between the government and Hollywood insofar as you very rarely see an anti-government film or an anti-law film or whatever. | |
| You may see sort of crooked cops or whatever, but they always get replaced by good cops like the good king at the end of Macbeth. | |
| But it would seem to me that, I mean, if I were running the government, put on my sort of tri-cornered hat of infinite evil, if I were running the government, I would really want the media on my side. | |
| I would really want the writers and producers and all that to be beholden to me so that I would not have to worry about critical messages, particularly at a time of significant social unrest such as the U.S. is going through. | |
| Do you think there's anything like that flowing on, I mean, in terms of the timing? | |
| I do. I think... | |
| I mean big media's interest in this is obvious. | |
| They want to use the state to keep their monopoly as long as they can. | |
| This is exactly what happened in the origins of the Copyright Act in the 1600s or 1700s. | |
| The Statute of Anne in 1710, the monopoly was given to – what happened was the – The monopoly was fading out, that the original earlier monopolies that were given to the censoring guilds, | |
| the stationers guild, was fading out, and so the printers wanted to keep their monopoly, so they petitioned the state, and the state said, well… We agree, but we'll give it to the authors instead. | |
| So they sort of undercut what they wanted, but it ended up going to the printers and the publishers anyway because of the system, because the authors have to go to the publishers. | |
| And I think the same thing is happening now. | |
| They are going to the state trying to keep their monopoly going as long as they can. | |
| From the state's point of view, the state is doing it in part to get bribed basically by these guys. | |
| They get tons of contributions. | |
| That's why they're fighting so hard for this. | |
| From Texas. Now, Texas, if anything, has high-tech industries like Dell and Compaq and even some Apple plants and things like this, and they're pretty much against this. | |
| We don't have Hollywood here in Texas, so why would Lamar Smith be doing this? | |
| There's got to be some graft and bribery going on here. | |
| But of course, I think also the state can use this as a method of control. | |
| I mean I'm sure you – I have a similar feeling. | |
| The internet, I believe, is one of the greatest tools of freedom of all time, and it's one of the greatest weapons that we have against the state because it's communication, it's learning, it's association. | |
| Now, of course, technology can be used by the state too, and I think the state hates and they fear the internet and the freedom that has sort of inadvertently – they've inadvertently allowed to happen with the way it happened, with the safe harbor visions they inadvertently let slip into the DMCA. So they are using every chance they can to find a way that they can come in and shut down – have a kill switch on people that they don't like or to have surveillance. | |
| So they do it in the name of child pornography. | |
| They do it in the name of terrorism. | |
| They do it in the name of intellectual property enforcement now. | |
| So I think they're using the media industry as tools, dupes in a way, to just assert more and more control at the same time that they're criticizing China and Egypt and others for having a restrictive policy of controls on the internet. | |
| Yeah, and it is, again, I think really committed people are going to continue, but there are lots of people out there who are going to shy away from this. | |
| It's the sort of well-known chilling effect of, well, I don't really know what the law is and it's really complicated, so maybe I'll just blog about my cooking or something like that. | |
| And of course, the other thing too is that people say, well... | |
| If there's no intellectual property controls or rights, then there'll be a diminishment of creative work. | |
| It doesn't explain something as simple as the billions of blogs around the world. | |
| Most people don't even make a spare change out of them, if anything. | |
| But their work's entirely copyright-free for the most part, and there's millions of people writing down their thoughts every day. | |
| Yeah, and in fact, most of the people that criticize it, they're commenting on someone's blog for free, and they're spending their time to make a comment. | |
| They're not getting paid for it, so why are they even doing it? | |
| No, I agree completely. | |
| The one good thing about this, the one silver lining is that it seems pretty clear that this SOPA will be unconstitutional. | |
| I think if they do enact it, it will be stricken – struck down – You mean our First Amendment grants? | |
| Yeah, it's a pretty clear – under US law anyway, and this is the US provision. | |
| Most other countries are really worried about this because it would allow the US – because the US has a strange stranglehold on the entire DNS system because of the way the internet arose. | |
| And of course they would try to use that to mess with the infrastructure of the internet, which would – could potentially disrupt the internet in other countries. | |
| And the law asserts jurisdiction over foreign companies. | |
| Like ISPs and other countries on the grounds that they have what's called NRIM presence in the US because they're on the internet basically. | |
| So it's – a lot of other countries at least are starting to get riled up about this American imperialism basically. | |
| But normally under US law and the Constitution, when there's a law that would prevent some kind of speech or chill speech, and this clearly would, without even a court hearing giving the other side a chance to reply, then there's really no due process. | |
| So that's called prior restraint, and I think it's going to be a pretty easy knockdown for the court. | |
| I mean I wouldn't be surprised if it gets struck down nine to zero, which makes it even more strange that the Congress would rush to put it through. | |
| I mean I personally think every single member of Congress that votes for this should be impeached because they're voting for something that is blatantly unconstitutional, and they're supposed to uphold the Constitution. | |
| Well, part of me says that if they feel they can get away with it for a year or two, I mean, I think it's probably fairly clear that the next year or two is kind of a make or break time in American politics with the deficit and all that. | |
| So I think that they're probably imagining that there's going to be a peak in civil unrest over the next year or two. | |
| And it's like, well, let's just get it in now and we'll deal with it later. | |
| And then Obama or whoever can extend it under some martial law provision or whatever. | |
| Yeah, I know it's really scary. | |
| Oh, there'll be enough civil unrest that people will say, well, we don't want to. | |
| Let's keep our clamps down and they'll just find some way to extend it. | |
| Yeah, the – there has been a heroic uprising on the internet, surprising a whole variety. | |
| If you look at the demographics of the people that oppose it, all the young people oppose this. | |
| The – democrats tend to oppose it more than republicans. | |
| Technology-savvy people oppose it manifestly, overwhelmingly. | |
| So the word is out there. | |
| It's been coming from all quarters, the EFF and other groups, and I think that the congress – Men that have been supporting this are pretty much aware now that they're voting for something that 80%, 70% of the country is against. | |
| But the problem is it's not strong opposition on a widespread basis because people don't understand this stuff. | |
| It's arcane, and they have – unlike the drug war, for example, the drug war is eventually going to fade away or at least marijuana because people know that you're not really hurting anybody. | |
| But people have been fed this propaganda that… IP is a property right, and so they have the cover of property rights. | |
| So in a way, this type of provision is more insidious than the Patriot Act or even war or even the drug war because it goes under the cover of property rights, which we support property rights. | |
| Right, and of course it's going to drive a lot of jobs overseas. | |
| People are just going to take all of their IT infrastructure and move it as far away from U.S. jurisdiction as possible. | |
| And it's going to chill investment into the IT sector. | |
| But again, these are all soft losses that are impossible to trace months or years down the road, where, of course, the immediate benefits of scaring people into not, quote, stealing from giant media, that's an immediate hit that you can say you've really done something. | |
| And again, it's that usual thing of visible gains and invisible losses that creates all of that lopsided rent-seeking incentives of state action. | |
| Yeah, but luckily I'm hopeful that the state will be unable – they'll just be unable to implement this even if they pass it. | |
| I mean like I mentioned, you have already tools like this DeSopa plug-in for Firefox and the – what's it, Mafia, something you mentioned, which by the way I think the law actually outlaws – Things like DSOPA because just like the DMCA outlawed what they call anti-circumvention technology. | |
| In other words, it outlawed owning a piece of hardware or equipment that you could use to decrypt an encrypted file, even if you have the right to decrypt it because you have a fair use right. | |
| And even if you weren't going to use it for that, just owning this piece of hardware, the problem is every computer can do this. | |
| So theoretically, the DMCA already outlaws every computer in the world. | |
| They just don't want to enforce it that way yet. | |
| And likewise, the SOPA will outlaw anti-circumvention procedures like the SOPA procedure, but I don't think they can actually stop it. | |
| So I'm hopeful that they will be ineffective in enforcing this if they get it passed, but maybe they won't pass it. | |
| Maybe they'll pass something really watered down. | |
| Well, I guess we can hope. | |
| And just, I guess, on a slight aside or to an end note, do you have any projects or speaking engagements coming up? | |
| I know you've done some great speeches recently, which I'll put some links to on the message board that I've really enjoyed. | |
| Did you have anything, any other fiery, denunciatory pulpit speeches coming up? | |
| I've just been blogging a lot lately on the Libertarian Standard, which is libertarianstandard.org or com, and I've got two or three books in the works. | |
| I've got one book in the works on intellectual property called Copy This Book. | |
| And I've got another book in the works as well. | |
| So that's what I'm focusing on right now. | |
| So just stay tuned. | |
| And I blog a lot on these issues, on intellectual property issues, on my website, c4sif.org, which stands for Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. | |
| So c4sif.org. | |
| I'll put that link in. And as always, it's been a real pleasure chatting with you. | |
| And have yourself a very, very Merry Christmas. |