In the Wake of SOPA, a New Open Letter Urges Changes from the U.S. Congress

by Sam Dean - Feb. 07, 2012Comments (1)

Rarely has the technology community gathered a bigger backlash against the government than it gathered during the U.S. debates over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). "The Internet and Free Speech will never be the same," if the legislation goes to law, pronounced Mozilla, and The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) vehemently opposed it as well. Now, those two organizations are just two of the more than 70 technology-focused organizations to pen an open letter to the U.S. Congress asking that government officials completely reassess the legislative process pertaining to Intellectual Property (IP).

According to the letter, Congress is guilty of "focusing exclusively on areas where some rights holders believe the law is too weak." The MPAA and RIAA--the powerful organizations behind movies and recordings--are chief proponents of proposed laws such as SOPA, which would grant the government unprecedented web censorship rights.

The letter adds:

"Now is the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from a fresh perspective. A wide variety of important concerns have been expressed including views from technologists, law professors, international human rights groups, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and above all, individual Internet users. The concerns are too fundamental and too numerous to be fully addressed through hasty revisions to these bills. Nor can they be addressed by closed door negotiations among a small set of inside the-beltway stakeholders."

Individual Internet users were indeed very vocal about SOPA, which The Electronic Frontier Foundation said would: "....grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs." More than 40 million users expressed their opposition to the proposed legislation.

The complete text of the new open letter is worth reading. Reddit, WordPress and many other familiar organizations have signed it.