(Host) The worldwide debate over how the U-S government might crack down on Internet piracy and counterfeit goods has drawn an equally pointed discussion in Vermont.
Part of the reason is that Senator Patrick Leahy has found himself at the center of the controversy.
VPR’s Jane Lindholm reports.
(Leahy) This debate has come to be known by its acronyms – PIPA and SOPA. Those are for the two bills pending in Congress – the Protect Intellectual Property Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act.
Senator Leahy is the author of PIPA, the Senate version. He’s been accused of trying to aid in shutting down Web sites without due process. He rejects the idea that’s what the bill is all about.
(Leahy) "You can’t arbitrarily shut down anything. There are due process clauses, there’s courts, there’s all the things that have to be done, any more than police officers can say ‘I think somebody in that house has stolen property so let’s just smash down the door and go in and search that house’. You can’t do that. Well you can’t do that on a website either."
(Lindholm) Leahy and other supporters say the goal of the proposals is to protect the people whose music, art and other intellectual property are regularly taken on the Web.
Jacob Edgar is the president of the world music label Cumbancha, based in Charlotte. He, too, rejects the concerns raised by the likes of Wikipedia, Google and other Internet giants.
(Edgar) "This legislation specifically talks about sites that are devoted to making pirated material available to the US that are located outside of the US and that are violating existing copyright laws. So I think people are being very reactionary about this law."
(Lindholm) Edgar says independent producers of Internet content can’t compete when their work is taken and spread on the Web, regardless of copyrights.
Opponents of the two bills say they don’t have any argument with that sentiment. They do have an argument – in fact, many arguments – with the way Congress is contemplating addressing the problem.
Jeremy Hansen is a computer science professor at Norwich University.
(Hansen) "I’m not against enforcement of copyright law. We have that out there. I’m against the way that these laws try to play whack-a-mole ineffectively. You’re taking much more action and infringing much more on first amendment rights here to achieve a goal that you don’t actually achieve. I could show just about anybody, computer savvy or not, how to get around this block in less than five minutes."
(Lindholm) So far, there’s been very little that the two sides in this debate agree on. And Vermont Law School Professor Oliver Goodenough says the debate has become very polarized, partly because the whole ethos of the internet, from its earliest creation, was one of openness
(Goodenough) "Some of the strength of the protest is coming from the fact that these bills significantly compromise that ethos. Compromise it in the pursuit of a public goal, but in pursuit of a public goal that was already one of propertizing, of control, of restraint. And that you’re seeing an intellectual and, quite frankly, emotional fight between these two deeply held sets of beliefs."
(Lindholm) Senator Leahy says he’s willing to work with all sides to try to resolve the impasse. But he says the problem with online piracy is real, and he’s committed to pushing a bill through Congress.
For VPR News, I’m Jane Lindholm.