Introduced in September by Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and senior Republican member Orrin Hatch, COICA was unanimously approved by the Committee, and will be sent to the full Senate for consideration.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The US Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a controversial bill that would give the authorities dramatic new copyright enforcement powers allowing it to take down entire domains “dedicated to online piracy” rather than just targeting files that actually infringe copyright law.
The bipartisan Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (or COICA) also provides law enforcement with tools to stop often foreign-owned and operated sites selling counterfeit goods ranging from new movie and music releases, to pharmaceuticals and consumer products.
COICA was introduced in September by Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and senior Republican member Orrin Hatch. The Committee voted unanimously, 19-0, to send the legislation to the full Senate for consideration.
“Rogue websites are essentially digital stores selling illegal and sometimes dangerous products,” stated Leahy. “If they existed in the physical world, the store would be shuttered immediately and the proprietors would be arrested.We cannot excuse the behavior because it happens online and the owners operate overseas. The Internet needs to be free – not lawless. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act will give the Department of Justice a new and more efficient process for cracking down on rogue websites, regardless of where overseas the criminals are hiding.”
The COICA bill requires that a court find the “rogue website is dedicated to infringing activity before any action is required,” according to Leahy.
Some, including digital rights organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org), however, find this wording to be problematic.
“COICA gives the government dramatic new copyright enforcement powers, in particular the ability to make entire websites disappear from the Internet if infringement, or even links to infringement, are deemed to be ‘central’ to the purpose of the site,” the EFF stated. “Rather than just targeting files that actually infringe copyright law, COICA’s “nuclear-option” design has the government blacklisting entire sites out of the domain name system – a reckless scheme that will undermine global Internet infrastructure and censor legitimate online speech.”
An open letter from Internet engineers to the Senate Judiciary Committee said that COICA could have disastrous implications for the long-established domain name system. “If enacted, this legislation will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS), create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. In exchange for this, the bill will introduce censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ ability to communicate.”
Given the inevitability of the blacklisting of useful, law-abiding sites, the organization suspects that alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use – which will be used by US citizens, but fall outside of the control of US service providers. This, they say, will cause errors and divergences to appear between these new services and the current global DNS, confusing browsers and leading to sites other than those blacklisted by the US government being affected.
While some including the EFF have argued that COICA is unconstitutional, conservative blogger Mark Corallo said that the US Constitution in Article I explicitly charges Congress with making laws to protect intellectual property, noting: “Our founding fathers understood that the creative genius of the American people was our greatest national resource and deserved protection.”
Corallo concluded, “Stopping counterfeiting and theft is not ‘Internet censorship,’ as breathlessly described by the website created to stop the bill. It is simply an attempt to stop people from engaging in the counterfeiting and online theft of American products that is the sole purpose of these rogue sites.”
The EFF contends, however, that this bill will not, in practice, help content creators: “The best way to help artists of every stripe get compensated for their work is to make sure that there is a thriving marketplace of innovative digital businesses to pay them. We already have examples of businesses like Pandora, YouTube, and Amazon Music that are paying real money to artists. And new innovators are heatedly working to create new services that will allow artists to engage fans and raise revenue in new and exciting ways.”
Internet lawyer and WHIR contributor David Snead noted in a recent blog post that COICA is a continuation of a “very troubling trend in US legislation” started by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of enforcing, essentially, guilty-until-proven-innocent statutes.
He also notes that statutes such as the DMCA and COICA are bound to burden Internet infrastructure providers with greater administrative hassle by failing to include provisions designed to provide clarity to the companies who will be asked to essentially enforce the law.
Given the far reaching implications of COICA, copyright infringers and counterfeiters are not going to be the only individuals affected by the bill.
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