Last Wednesday, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), introduced the E-PARASITE Act, a measure that will shackle innovation and freedom on the Internet in an attempt to stop piracy.
The proposed legislation, which features even more aggressive policies than those contained in the Senate’s already controversial Protect IP Act, has caused widespread outrage in online communities. The measure seeks to give the federal government excessive legal power on the Internet, allowing it to shut down websites almost as it pleases based on ambiguous anti-piracy clauses.
Certainly, a productive economic system must protect intellectual property, which is necessary to incentivize continued innovation by companies and entrepreneurs. However, this bill’s blatant shift of authority from the courts to the Justice Department is suggestive of the legislation’s corporate backing. It is disappointing yet unsurprising that the bipartisan group behind the bill is attempting to enact all of the entertainment industry’s legal fantasies into law.
Though the act claims to protect users from “notorious infringers,” it functionally empowers corporations to pressure the government to unilaterally block any content by websites that purportedly violate intellectual property rights. Any foreign website that the Attorney General deems as infringing of intellectual property rights can instantly be blocked by the federal government without any hearing. Bypassing the courts, the legislation would empower a political appointee to be the entertainment industry’s hatchet man, cutting down whatever nascent websites or technologies that those industries consider threatening. With this act, corporate capture of government proceeds even further.
However, corporations are not the only ones that come out ahead in this battle. The bill gives the government and its lawyers the indiscriminate authority of identifying and analyzing “notorious foreign infringers.” The same bureaucrats can then also directly intervene and shut down the same domains based on their own interpretations of the new law. Censorship that ought to remain an open legal process would take place in a matter of seconds and with just a few signatures from Justice Department officials.
As we have seen, the Internet has been a powerful force for good in recent times—especially in major democratic revolts in the Arab world—and there is no reason to believe its importance will decrease. The web is a great equalizer, offering an unparalleled venue for people from all over the world to communicate, share ideas and organize. Building a firewall around America does injustice to our democratic ideals. Congress must scrap the E-PARASITE Act.
