In a blatant act of hypocrisy, Cary Sherman the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), as well as his allies, are claiming that the public was misinformed about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP (PIPA) when they opposed those bills.  As Sherman said, “misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works.”  His organization would know given that for more than a year the RIAA, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and other pro-SOPA and pro-PIPA allies actively engaged in misinforming Congress on the implications of the SOPA and PIPA.  

Former Senator Chris Dodd has been buttering the popcorn of movie theater owners since becoming Hollywood's chief lobbyist. So it's not surprising to see the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) and the MPAA commiserating together over what happened to SOPA. They're united in the delusion that the revolt of Internet users was started and orchestrated by Google--it's more comforting, no doubt, to paint a large corporation as the bad guy, instead of facing up to the reality of a populist revolt against your own greed and overreach.

Yesterday was absolutely one of those days that reminds me why I stay in public advocacy. I’m a democracy junkie. Yes, I admit it. The sight of literally millions of people remembering that they are citizens and not just consumers gets me juiced.

The good news is that by every possible metric, SOPAStrike was an enormous success. We absolutely shocked the poop out of members of Congress and broke through the infamous “Washington bubble” that separates our elected officials from what is actually going on in the real world. As a result, we forced more than 20 Senators to come out publicly against PIPA/SOPA, including a number of co-sponsors withdrawing support. Fantastic!

This is the question that is before Congress as it decides on what to do with the Domain Name Server filtering provisions in the Stopping Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).  Public Knowledge has advocated from the beginning against this provision because it would make the Internet less secure, sacrifice our moral high ground internationally, and to top it off it will do nothing to deter Internet piracy.  So while many would experience revulsion at the idea of adopting any tool that is used in the Great Firewall of China, the proponents of SOPA and PIPA have in fact, embraced it.

Warner Bros. on Monday admitted to removing content from Hotfile.com that Warner never even looked at and didn’t actually own.  The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently pending in the House of Representatives, give companies like Warner incredible new levels of power that they have never had under the DMCA.  If Warner’s recklessness under the current legal framework shows us anything, it’s that Congress’ proposition to give these kinds of companies even greater power is about as sensible as parents giving to their teenager the keys to the brand new family car after he just got a DUI crashing the old one. 

Today, the MPAA and other movie industry groups sent a letter to the Senate urging them to pass S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act. The letter attempts to handwave away real questions about the bill's effects on security and free speech with some awfully weak arguments embedded within its refrains of "piracy is a problem" and "we are a big industry."

No one contests that movies are a big industry, or that there's a lot of infringement on the Internet. But those aren't the questions before Congress. The question really is whether S. 968 does any net good. And from here, it certainly doesn't look like it.

Hotfile, an online locker service, went beyond its legal obligations to accommodate movie studio Warner Bros. to take down infringing content from Hotfile’s site.  Warner is even quoted as praising Hotfile’s efforts and suggesting that Hotfile provide the same service to other content owners.  So what did Hotfile get in return?  Warner wrongfully deleted files it didn’t own and then sued Hotfile with four other major studios, all represented by the MPAA, claiming Hotfile’s service carried out “unabashed theft” of their copyrighted works.  Betrayed Hotfile is now fighting back with a counterclaim against Warner for DMCA violations and fraud.

UPDATE: Added mention of the $35 appeal fee in the "Appeals" section below.

Today, major ISPs joined the RIAA and MPAA in announcing a joint program to deal with file-sharing. The document governing this agreement, a "Copyright Alert System," is hosted here. Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology issued a joint statement on the CAS, available here.

Beyond that, what does this agreement represent? It extends some of the characteristics of some ISPs' existing voluntary notice-forwarding agreements, while stopping short of a three-strikes-and-you're-out procedure.

On this week's podcast we discuss increasing transparency at the FCC in light of Commissioner Baker's announced departure to Comcast, a proposed warrantless entry law for copyright violators in California, and how you can follow in Jonathan Coulton's successful footprints with the Creators Freedom Project co-sponsored Rock Your Net workshops.  We also discuss "nothing less than a frontal assault on academic fair use" with the Association of Research Libraries' Brandon Butler.

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