 This is Derek Hanna. I will introduce you. Derek is currently a visiting fellow at law school in the Information Society project. OK. I first e-met him. It's the first time we've met physically, but I first became aware of Derek a few months ago when a report came out that got widely circulated very quickly on the web because it was from the Republican study group. And it was about the myths of copyright with the number of proposals for copyright reform. And it was circulating to a large degree because, first of all, it was very nicely written. And from a certain point of view, which I'll say is mine, it may not be shared. It made a lot of sense. It was really a straightforward exposition of some things that were obvious as soon as the report said them and some reforms that seemed to be eminently sensible. And it was coming from the Republican study group. And so it got a lot of attention. Certainly was very interesting to me. We got to know each other a bit through Twitter and email and the like. Derek has gone on to the most recent project that you initiated was a White House petition in response to the making illegal of jailbreaking your phones, which is that approximately right? Unlocking your phones. Yeah. OK. For use across networks, which was the most popular, most signed White House petition ever. As of then, yeah. It's been surpassed. I think it has been, yeah. You know by what? That's just a little longer. I'm pretty high, too. OK. Nevertheless, a massively successful White House petition. And so Derek is going to talk with us about political activism in the age of the net. Great. Great. Thank you, Derek. Thanks for the introduction. I'm going to quickly go through the copyright memo. I don't want to dwell too much time on it, not because I'm not interested in it, but because I've written about it. I could take questions in the Q&A. But I'd rather talk a little bit about how we kind of connect the dots, because I assume that many of you in this room have kind of a consensus on some things that need to be reformed on technology policy. And the question is, why doesn't Washington get it? And how can we connect the dots between the two? And I like to point out that I'm not that partisan of a guy. I feel like on technology policy, the dominant divide is between those who get it, which is this room, and those who don't get it. And as liberals or Republicans or conservatives, however you define yourself, we can quibble on some of the details. But I feel like that's kind of an incidental conversation to that broader one of, how do we even have the conversation on the topic of, what is worthwhile for the economy and innovation? How do we even frame the discussions in that way? What I mean by that is copyright law hasn't really been assessed in at least 15 years since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. That's evidence of a system that's not even self-questioning. That's not even inquisitive on these issues of tech policy. And so I'm hoping to connect some of the dots for you guys in this room and figure out how you guys can be useful going forward and talk about some of my work. Disruptive innovation, you guys all know that term. This is Harvard, the university, that con, or Clegg, Christensen con that term. You guys are the first ones, by the way, that I've used a PowerPoint presentation on. So you're kind of the guinea pig. And I'm not so good at it. All right. My backstory. I'm a mass Jesus guy. Worked for Governor Romney. Worked for Senator Scott Brown's campaign. Came up with Senator Scott Brown. Went to Washington, DC. Worked for Senator Scott Brown during SOPA and then went over to the House Republican Study Committee. Now, as far as my conversation today, I'm trying to loosely frame it on three key rules that I see as key rules for activism in the technology realm. Number one, being right is just part of the battle. So we could all agree in this room that the white way to proceed on copyright is X. But being right is not inherently enough to win the political battle. Number two, it's less important what you say. It's more important how you say it. And it's most important who says it. And number three, which is kind of related, is the framing of the issue is everything. Now, what do I mean by framing? I'm going to get to that a little bit later. But it's basically how you present and conceive of the issue in general. So to delay men, the idea of copyright is it's dealing specifically with content. But I think many of us know in this room that the issues of copyright are actually much more they touch a number of other issues. And so our intellectual framing of an issue like copyright is very detached from the intellectual framing on Capitol Hill. And so that framing is really critical in how SOPA was won and how future battles will be won and lost. So starting out on SOPA, so that quote is from Adam Green. He says, it's not a battle of left versus right. Frankly, it's a battle of all versus new, which is a similar point to what I'm saying before. Those who get it and those who don't get it. Just pointing out how dramatic of an incident SOPA was for someone who worked on Capitol Hill at the time is there was enormous energy behind this. For weeks we had seen the danger clouds growing, but the amount of money that was in favor of SOPA was quite overwhelming. And they had been lobbying on this for about three years. And I remember telling all my friends about how terrible this bill was back when it was Koika. And it just seemed like there was no opposition at all. And then out of nowhere in that last month, this real groundswell came of about 3 million people reaching out to the members of Congress, crashing congressional circuit boards and websites, tweeting and Facebooking. Most of us had never seen like this ever before. The big thing for me was not only did members come out against this bill, that happens all the time. But members who had come out and were cosponsoring the bill decided that they were now against their own legislation. That's never happened before to my knowledge. And it was quite astounding. Now, I was very pleased that Senator Scott Brown actually came out against SOPA. He had never cosponsored SOPA. And there were many members like Senator Scott Brown, but something like 40 or 50 members had actually cosponsored and actually reversed their decisions. And I wanted to briefly give my perspective on the real story of SOPA. I think there's been a kind of revisionist history in the past year to say that SOPA was a battle of Google. It was Google, Wikipedia, and some other big companies that came in and killed SOPA. If you ask anyone who worked on Capitol Hill, they'll tell you the real story. And the real story is three million people reached out to the member of Congress and killed us. And it was people like Elizabeth Stark, Alexis O'Hanion, Aaron Schwartz. And it was other people who were on the ground in Washington, D.C., who understood the process a little bit better, but didn't have the technology credentials and helped connect the dots between the two. And that's really what helped change this movement. I think that this revisionist story is a worthwhile one, both for Google, but also for the Chamber of Commerce, RA, and MPAA. They don't want to admit that they lost to average people. It's much better for them to say, we lost to Google. I think that will help you keep your job. Sorry. I don't know how many of you've seen this video. This is from Mario Salvio at UC Berkeley. It's a really pretty cool quotation. I'm not going to play the video for you, but he talks about how when the system is so awry that you have to throw your gears on the fundamental working of the system and say, I'm not going to take part in the system anymore. And to me, that was what SOPA was. It was 3 million people reaching out to the member of Congress and saying that we're not going to sit passively by. We're actually going to intervene in this process and muck up the gears, as he would call it. So after SOPA, as someone who worked on tech policy, the most common question that I received on any tech bill is, is this SOPA? And I almost don't know how to respond, because I didn't know if they were literally asking if this was SOPA reincarnated, or if this is going to piss off people like SOPA. But this is the most common question. And Lufgren had said, SOPA was inevitable before it was unthinkable. I think that's a good illustration of it. Now, why do I talk about SOPA in context of what I'm doing and what I'm talking about? Because in SOPA, they mastered all the rules that I'm talking about here. The framing was perfect. The actors who were making the message was perfect. The framing was, this is going to censure the internet. It's actually going to hurt and hinder innovation. And those who were saying it were left, right, and center. It was venture capitalists like Brad Burnham, who was saying, I don't invest in companies that deal with copyright laws because of these crazy copyright laws, and this is going to hurt innovation. And it was guys like Alexis Ohanian, who was saying, my website Reddit won't be able to function anymore in this world. Or Ben Ha, saying, cheeseburgers won't be able to function in this world. And so it was this really united movement that had kind of the talking points of the left and the right. And now linking to my memo. So that's me, my boss, Jim Jordan. So I was always interested in tech policy and copyright law in particular. And so we reached out to all our members of Congress trying to figure out who wanted to work on copyright law. No one responded. I was told to write a report on copyright law. And the way I started was this fundamental reframing of the issue, what became the three myths. So on copyright. This is the dominant frame today on Capitol Hill and in Washington, DC. And this is the result of 15 year plus of RAA, MPAA lobbying. Basically piracy's bad, cost-American jobs, copyright's good, what I call copyright plus is even better. What is copyright plus? Copyright plus is a system that means copyright should go on for life plus 70 years. Copyright plus is a system that says it's logical for individuals to be liable for a billion dollars of damages. That's copyright plus. That's something far removed from what is traditionally defined as copyright. And that only exists in a world where you're so scared of American jobs being lost to piracy. So my first goal was, how can I change this narrative? How can I talk about copyright reform without dealing with some of the issues of piracy? Without discounting their arguments on the impact on American jobs. And we can have an intellectual conversation in this room about the real impact on piracy. But that's not really the conversation on Capitol Hill. And at CPAC about a month ago, I was on a debate that kind of went like that, where there are five people, they all said piracy is bad, cost American jobs, copyright's good. And I went and I said, you know, this is your argument so far, is that correct? They nodded their head. And what I said to them, which may not work in this room but it works in a conservative audience is, who in this room thinks that terrorism is bad? Everyone raises their hand. Who in this room thinks the TSA is the only way to protect us on an airplane? No one raised their hand. And then I posited the question, can we have a system that deals with piracy and protects content holders that isn't so crazy as to make 23 million Americans felons for unlocking and jailbreaking their iPhones? Can we do that? And the answer is yes. There's nothing about dealing with piracy or protecting copyright holders that requires these asinine systems. And that's the logic train that I'm trying to pair it. So these are the three myths I pointed out, not gonna spend too much time on it, basically talking about the main purpose of copyright, that it's not free market, that it doesn't lead to the most innovation productivity. I call it a Goldilocks-like predicament. Just one point in this slide, hashtag what would the founding fathers do? I just came up with that. So this is the original copyright law of our founding fathers. Also for that matter, there was the system under Grapebird and the Statue of Anne. And this is the current copyright law today, life of the author plus 70 years. So you can see there's a pretty significant discharge there. And I think that the liberal response to this is that doesn't seem fair, that's hurting the consumer. I think the Republican conservative response to this is, wait, that the above is what the founding fathers wanted and that's kind of consistent with the constitution and the bottom is wildly divergent from what the constitution actually says. I think it's important to try to frame these issues in both left and right polarity. And these are the policy solutions I talked about. I could talk about these in the Q and A, but I don't think it's that radical here. And after the memo came out, we got overwhelming support from conservative groups on the right, American conservative unions up there. You may not know about it, but they're the ones who put on CPAC. They represent every conservative organization, Washington DC. They came out, put on the front page and endorsed it. And so we were actually very surprised by the amount of support that we got from conservative circles. So why did I take on copyright? I think we need creative destruction of failed ideas. I think this leads to more innovation. Oh, there, this is an important one. So the memo was officially written, officially approved, it went through all the normal processes and we expected it to be very controversial, but we thought it was an important thing to put out nonetheless. And the point of the memo again was to try to reframe the debate because none of those things were dealing with the issues of piracy. They're saying that we can have a different, more rational system that protects copyright. All right, so memo comes out, memo gets pulled in 24 hours, two weeks later, I'm told that I'm out of a job. So January 6th is my last day at work. And my question was, what can I do from here going forward to kind of connect the dots? So learn from what people on the outside did during SOPA and what I knew on the inside through the copyright memo and try to leverage it going forward. Cause it's one thing when you're on the inside to go for the big play, but I believe that when you're on the outside, we need to go for the small strategic battles. So I wrote about it in Boing Boing. I said SOPA was impressive, but stopping legislation is one thing, actually putting new legislation on the table and actually utilizing the mechanisms that are designed for failure, that's another level of expertise. And that requires you to learn the rules of Washington DC. While those in this room and across the country and the tech community may not want to be playing by the exact same parameters, you have to understand how DC operates and then attempt to hack that process. So understand how it works, we don't have to do the exact same thing that the content industry does, but just understand how they work. And a key case and point is, a few weeks ago, the head of the copyright office testified at the Judiciary Committee actually endorsed many of the reforms that I talked about, like lowering the length of copyright, calling for a great new copyright act, updating copyright for the digital generation. Before she testified, the day before, the content industry published an editorial and roll call, again, making this argument. Copyright law has led to this massive innovation in the United States. It's one of the great U.S. exports, why we want to tamper with it and change it. That's not being done by the other side. There was one editorial and roll call, there was no countering editorial and roll call, and that's because the RA and the MPA are there on the ground. They know how to utilize the process. They know that roll call is read by every member of Congress and their staff. And we need to have that level of expertise in understanding the internal workings of Congress if we want to fix Congress. This is what I talked about in my boing-boing piece, and I gave a whole bunch of pointers on how to reform technology law in general. Number one, don't wait for the next SOPA. SOPA's not coming back, it's not. They learned their lesson. And what is that lesson? That it was a big overplay of their hand and that they're much smarter and more insidious ways to accomplish their goals. What do I mean by that? Okay, so one of the worst provisions of SOPA was taking down these rogue websites, specifically taking it down for American citizens, but taking down these rogue websites. They've been able to do most of that through ICE, Immigration and Custom Enforcement, as some of you in this room obviously know. Hundreds of websites, even Mega Upload was taken down the week after SOPA. The other part of SOPA that was pretty significant was payment processing, getting MasterCard and Visa to shut off funding for Pirate Bay. They were able to accomplish that without legislation. And the third part is getting Google and other websites to take down links to torrents and other pirating and fringing content. They were also able to accomplish that. So in a world where they've accomplished those three main goals, why would they try to come up with the next SOPA? That's probably not their design plan. Instead, they're trying to utilize our international trade agreements to lock in intellectual property law going forward, which is what they've been successful in doing. The past 12 intellectual international treaties include stock language that basically codifies the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forever. Now that's a big problem because Digital Millennium Copyright Act is domestic law and intellectual property law should change as the economy changes. But they were very smart to the point where today this is just stock language that you put in any treaty. And it's gonna be in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty and then some. It's rumored that the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty is gonna include Life Plus 70, which is a further ramping up of the international treaty system. So if you can do these things through treaty, through the back door, in a way that the American citizens are not really aware of, and in a way that only requires approval from the Senate, or if you're really smart, you do it as an executive agreement, which is the same thing as a treaty except it doesn't require approval, which is what ACTA was, then you can avoid ever dealing with the SOPA problem ever again. I say that not to disenchant you guys who are waiting on the sideline for the next SOPA, but to say that we have to be more activist rather than passive if we actually want to help solve the problem. We need to analyze existing law. Before SOPA, there was the DMCA, and the DMCA was extremely controversial when it passed. There are many provisions in the DMCA that are just as odious or nearly just as odious as SOPA is. Number four is my most interesting. Support will require support from both the left and the right, which is again, is can we frame these arguments in ways that appeals left and the right? Number five, we all have our own issues, pet projects, things that we find particularly interesting, but we need to figure out how we can work together as a collective whole, because that's what SOPA was. SOPA was a broad segment of the American people, a diverse coalition that had never assembled together coming under one banner. And number six is my most, my favorite, kind of the Sun-Soo thing, is you have to focus upon asymmetrical warfare. Where are you strong and they are weak? Where have they overplayed their hand? So SOPA was a key one where they overplayed their hand. But there are other examples of US law that have had such an incredible, I mean a crazy impact that it makes your argument much more easy. So what I mean by that is, is if you want to take on wholesale copyright law, that's not asymmetric warfare. There's a strong argument on the other side. Copyright law has created all this content, all this innovation, why would you tamper with it? But what I wanted to find was the asymmetric war, the asymmetric battles that didn't have a very strong counter argument. I don't know if you've seen the ad from Apple. You should watch it, it's pretty good. Basically he says, you know, we are the pirates, we need to think different. We are the innovators. It ends with the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world or the ones that do. So overall my thesis is, and I don't mean to say this to be disrespectful, but we lack the institutional capacity to quickly intervene in the political process and the way the content industry does. We need to be smarter and more tactical. Big battles require ramping up and reframing the issue, require a solid coalition going into them. And frankly they require winning small battles first. The content industry did not start with the Sunny Bono Act, which was the fundamental reshaping of copyright law. They started with smaller incidental battles going forward. And you can see that, I mean a variety of movement politics. I'm not an expert in movement politics, but you can see that in women's rights. You can see that in rights for minorities, for the gay community. Every movement politics across this country has started small and worked their way up. And that's, if I can impress one thing upon you guys, it's that we should start with the small battles and work our way up, rather than looking for the big kahuna. Small, highly strategic affirmative victories. These are the things that it will do. The coalition's important, the dialogue and framing's important. Number three and number four are also critical. Number three's kind of more of don't rub the conservatives the wrong way. You don't want to be perceived as fighting the man. You know, that companies are evil, they're stealing all of our profits. That's a very counterproductive message when one party basically perceives itself as the party of business. So how are you ever going to win over a party that sees themselves as the party of business? And intellectually, many of you in this room may say, well, why would we want to win them over? It's because you have to get 51% of Congress, so. We're going to have to figure out a narrative that deals with the man argument. And number four, create a David versus Goliath narrative, which is important because if you want to create a sustained movement campaign, you need to get media attention. And the media likes the narrative of the David versus Goliath story more than any other, in at least my experience. You don't want to talk about piracy. You want to run away from piracy, at least for now. And the DMCA may need to be completely replaced, but those are non-stars on Capitol Hill. So right now there's a movement underfoot, basically saying that we should completely get rid of the DMCA. Well, that's an interesting intellectual conversation, but what you're doing, if you're being tactical about implementing that on Capitol Hill, is saying, I want to go to war with the RA, MPA, Chamber of Commerce, but also every tech company. I also want to go to war with Facebook and with Google and with Twitter. And I want to go to war with Hattery that represents small, innovative companies. So who do you have on your side in that type of a battle? That's not necessarily the smartest way to proceed, is going against some of the better actors in the tech industry. So my first campaign was on the issue of cell phone unlocking. So I don't know how familiar you guys are in this. I can speed up or slow down depending on your level of expertise. I assume many of you in this room actually understand this issue even better than I do. But cell phone unlocking is broadly speaking where you change the settings on your phone usually through an unlocking code to allow your phone to be used on another carrier. So you travel abroad, you can buy a SIM card when you get off the aircraft and use your phone over there or if you have a phone in the United States you can use it to switch carriers. So if you analyze the US market versus international markets you'll realize that we pay about 400 to 800% more than other countries for slower speeds than other countries. And I would argue that the locking technology is one of the main reasons for that disparity is because it's difficult to have a thriving competitive market where you have these monopolies, sorry not monopolies, this isn't exactly the right word, these contractual walled gardens of iPhone and other carriers. And so unlocking is one of the few technologies that allowed for customers to compete. A similar technology before was keeping your phone number which none of the phone companies wanted customers to be able to do. It required a legislation from Congress to say customers should be able to keep their phone numbers from one carrier to the other. So I took on this issue because AT&T and Verizon petitioned the Library of Congress to make this technology illegal. Effectively, what actually happened was the Digital Limit Copyright Act always made unlocking and jailbreaking illegal. The librarian was giving exceptions. The librarian decided to not give an exception because they were asked by the big wireless companies that also incidentally spend $32 million a year lobbying and this is one of their top reported issues. And AT&T and Verizon of course don't want unlocking because customers are able to switch to other carriers. Less so with Verizon. So my first article in the Atlantic, I thought the above was a little bit funny. I'm pro-choice with regard to my smartphone. I hope my Congressman is as well. That actually was too controversial. They actually took, they got rid of that line. I was censured by the Atlantic. So the other thing that I point out in the article is technology for the blind also has to get approval every three years. Can you imagine a more onerous regulation than one that requires the association for the blind to petition every three years? It doesn't make any sense. And the idea that Americans can be liable for five years in prison for this is a crazy and stark example of how much the copyright system has been abused. And that was one of the reasons I focused on this issue. And I talked about, you know, over federal over criminalization. But overall, I expected this battle to be a tough one. It's a very complicated technological issue that few people actually understand. I mean, I spent most of my conversations and media appearances trying to explain what unlocking is. And it's a very complicated legal issue. In fact, I was the first one to demonstrate legally that this may be liable for five years in prison. No one had done the legal analysis to find out what the actual penalty was. So people didn't understand it. People don't understand what it meant. It didn't get any real media attention. The tech blogs aren't real media attention. I mean, it didn't get any mainstream media attention. It had a $32 million industry protecting it and it had no discernible counter lobby. One of the most unfortunate things about Capitol Hill is whenever you talk about a new policy idea, they always ask where the game board is. Who's on your side? Because I know who's on the other side but who's on your side? And on this issue, when I talked to Congressman, I said, well, America, innovation, new companies, new market models, that's a real problem in Capitol Hill is we don't have a lobby group for the future. We don't have anyone articulating what industry, what market models could be. And so it's kind of a hypothetical argument. Well, if we allowed for unlocking, then we may have these SIM cards that people could buy. But as the campaign went further, the examples became more stark and more obvious on the innovations that we were actually inhibiting. So one of my favorite examples is a company called Republic Wireless. I don't know if any of you are familiar with them. Okay, probably a board member, right? Oh, a huge fan. So what they do is they do a $19, all you can eat unlimited data, unlimited voice, unlimited tax plan. The catch is if you're in a Wi-Fi zone, it automatically jumps on Wi-Fi. If you're not in a Wi-Fi zone, it goes on spread. It's not that complicated. Makes a lot of sense, particularly when we have a big spectrum crunch in this country and you're able to offload all that data chunk. Unfortunately, that requires essentially a specialized version of the operating system. So if you have another phone, you're gonna have to route the phone or jailbreak the phone on an iPhone. They only have a relationship with one carrier, sorry, with one handset. And frankly, it's kind of a crummy phone. So realistically, their biggest impediment to growth today is customers being able to take over good phones, unlock those phones to Republic Wireless and use it with Republic Wireless. And in a world where phones are quickly becoming commodities, and we can disagree on that, but broadly speaking, I think that phones are becoming commodities. You can imagine a world where your two-year-old phone is essentially as good as your current phone and you would like to port it over or portering it over is something that's suboptimal but worthwhile because of the savings overall. The other issue is there was no partisan advantage for either party and it was the result of an unelected bureaucrat from the legislative branch that also no one understood. But we succeeded in a White House petition that got to 114,000 signatures, making cell phone unlocking legal. And it was able to do this partially because of the coalition that it already assembled for SOPA and it was able to do this because everyone had a cell phone. They quickly understood that this affected them personally, even if it didn't really affect them personally, but they just had an experience with the technology underneath. And it was able to grow because it had arguments on the left and arguments on the right. The argument on the left is again, primarily one of fairness. Customers should be able to do what they want with their own device. The argument on the right, I'm sorry, their own device, also cell phone companies are kind of evil. On the right was if you bought the phone, it's your property. And if it's your property, then you should do whatever you want with it. Very similar arguments, but it's almost like how you parse the language and how you talk about the issue. Fairness versus property rights. That's not entirely accurate, but that's a broad sample on kind of the discussion. And my kind of added value was trying to pitch this as an issue of innovation, which I think is a cross-partisan issue. If you talk about things in the realm of new competition, new market models, and innovation overall, I think you can win over a whole new crop of people. So after we got the petition to 114,000 signatures, the first, the FCC announced investigation. That was pretty cool. Then the White House came out and endorsed to unlock it. The language that I use in my articles were that it's anti, it's, again, it doesn't make it, it's anti-common sense, is the term I use in the Atlantic. They actually quoted my term anti-common sense, but that was kind of funny. But basically the White House came out and said customers should be able to unlock their phones. And this is an important part of a competitive and thriving market. And the interesting thing was, before the White House did this, I had been reaching out to members of Congress since early January when the ruling went into effect and said get in front of this issue, make this your issue, because you're gonna have lots of people who support you, but don't wait for the White House to act. I particularly made this argument to the right because I worry that after Obama endorsed it, they would not want to touch it. And what we had was we had Representative DeFazio who tweeted in favor of it. We had Tea Party Nation which tweeted in favor of it, sorry, came out in favor of it, emailed all the Tea Party groups. We had the National College of Republicans, Young Americans for Liberty, EFF, Public Knowledge, and VentSurf, just to name a few. And I'm pretty sure that that coalition has never existed before on any issue. And that was the power of this issue because each of them had their own social circles. The people that the National College of Republicans were talking to and sending it to college Republican chapters across the country were not the same people that EFF was talking to out in California. And I was wrong. Three hours after the White House endorsed, Congressman Jason Trapitz from Utah, one of the most conservative members of Congress, he tweeted in favor of unlocking. And I did hear from some members of Congress saying, oh, Obama endorsed it, EFF that. But for the most part, the response on the right was Trapitz's response. We got a number of bills introduced in Congress, both on the Senate side and on the House side. This is not an overwhelming success. There were failures along the way. There were things to be learned from. Most importantly, we had the institutional capacity to get the White House petition to 114,000 signatures. But we lost all the data along the way. We don't know who those 114,000 people are. We had no ability to communicate with them. And as a result, after that petition hit the number, and after the bills were introduced, we have no ability to mobilize those people and say, this bill's good, these other five bills are terrible. We have no ability to really utilize the processes of Capitol Hill in order to ensure the right result now that we have something on the table. Those are things that need to be learned going forward, because simply getting people activated in the first part is really step one. But I still think it's pretty good. So why was it so successful? We boiled the issue down to simple terms. It was a very complicated issue, but we made it simple. And SOPA, it was also made very simple. In fact, it was perhaps even oversimplified in SOPA. But in SOPA, the issue was SOPA equal censorship. SOPA means that your websites that you currently go to, you won't be able to go to. SOPA hurts innovation. Those are the type of arguments that came out during SOPA. And I'm sure you guys in this room can think of a few handful others, but those are very simple terms rather than kind of the abstract intricacies of the DNS system and the IP system that I had to deal with working in Capitol Hill. Number two, we leveraged social media, just like in SOPA, oh, we weren't as good as in SOPA. We had one video on unlocking and that video was the number one video produced by Reason TV for the year. We would have liked to have had more video content. We didn't have that capacity. But it shows that video is much more engaging than other forms of media. We had a diverse coalition. We eventually gained mainstream credibility. We were emailing reporters left and right and no one cared about the story. And we couldn't get anyone's attention. And then the White House petition hit 100,000 signatures and myself and the other guy, I've seen it kind of far, we basically had to turn our phones off the hook. I mean, it was CNN and it was New York Times and every outlet across the country that wanted to talk about this issue suddenly. We were able to get it on that mainstream level, but that was because of the White House's response. It was because of the petition and the White House's response. We created a media spectacle. Number six is also important. We had this measurable demonstration of support, which was that White House petition, which is more than just a lot of letters to Congress. We actually had something tangible. Kept Congress in the loop and avoided the issue of piracy. Talked about competition, innovation, property rights. So I actually presented this at a conservative organization and I got called a Marxist. They said, oh, you're just against contracts and this is about subsidized phones. And I went on Fox Business and they said the exact same thing to me, basically. I didn't use the word Marxist, but they said, you're just against contracts. And so that was an issue that we had to wade carefully in on this issue was that we aren't against contract law. Whenever you take up a campaign, you have to know where your third rails are. On this issue, we knew our third rails was subsidized phones and contract law. And our response was that that's between you and your carrier, but the federal government should not be arresting people for violating their contracts. You're not arrested for violating your contract on your lease or on your mortgage. We deal with those through civil penalties and through contract law. I mentioned that because these are issues that you're going to encounter going forward on SISPA or on CFAA reform or any of these other issues. You have to know where your third rails are and how to navigate them properly. These are other reasons why it was successful. It's very unfair. We dealt with the contract law argument through math and logic. Talked about innovation. Now, this is kind of the why. Why did I talk about this issue? It was more than just that it affected 23 million Americans. I approached this issue because I thought it was a small, winnable battle that would make Congress for the first time question the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If we get a hearing out of this issue before they pass the bill, that's a win because in that hearing they're going to bring in some of the experts to talk about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. To most members of Congress, this is the first time that they were aware that by default we have a law that effectively bans new technologies. It's a pretty crazy statute that we've developed and members of Congress were so unaware that this is what it took to put that on their radar. Is thousands of their constituents writing to them about this issue? And now they're aware of the accessibility technology for the blind, of the jail-breaking issue. Some of them are aware of the issues relating to cryptography research. Number four, the biggest impediment to fixing this problem is international treaties, which again is the backdoor of the content industry. And I wanted this issue to put that front and center because I knew that conservatives in particular who are naturally skeptical of international law and treaties, once they learn more about this issue, would start to question the TPP treaty. Want to have oversight hearings of the TPP treaty. Same, we've already locked ourselves in these intellectual property laws going forward. What are we locking ourselves in with this new treaty? And the last one's also important is we figured out what groups want to move forward with positive activism rather than just responding to the next SOPA. So this was the reason why I took on this issue overall. Just a little bit more about why it's important. This is kind of my point from the Atlantic article that summed up my entire argument for the campaign, that a free society shouldn't have to petition the government every three years to allow access to technology that are ordinary and commonplace. This is actually a similar doctrine to freedom of speech, which is that you can't ban someone's freedom of speech unless you have a overwhelming and compelling governmental interest. I think we should have a similar standard in this country for what technologies we ban. And we can have an intellectual discussion about the government not being able to ban any technologies. But I think that this is a kind of a middle ground that talks about this argument. And these are kind of my next steps going forward. But I would rather hear some questions from you guys, talk about some of the issues that you're engaged with, such as CFA reform and SISPA, and see how I could help you kind of leverage my knowledge of DC, issues that you're interested in. I'll say a few words on CFA just before I go to questions, which is the statute's terrible. It's widely acknowledged as being terrible. I think there's a consensus across the left and the right that's terrible. But no one's written about it in weekly standard or national review. No one's written about it in some of the, or the Hill or in Politico. And so it hasn't really reached that level of attention to members of Congress. So a real problem with CFA reform is that most members of Congress who are frankly unfamiliar with technology, their understanding right now of cybersecurity is that the sky is falling. Because I worked in three separate Congresses, they're two year cycles, three separate Congresses, and each Congress, we had people talk to us about the new cybersecurity legislation. I mean, there are a whole bunch of different versions of it. And now the CISPA bill. And each time it was saying, you know, the Chinese are stealing billions of dollars of intellectual property. Just about a month ago, members of the Supreme Court, their work accounts, internal deliberations of the Supreme Court were hacked into by anonymous. Many members of Congress have had their accounts compromised by the Chinese or by other groups. Frankly, many of them deserved it because their default password was on every computer, but it's a side story. But that's what every person in Congress is hearing about cybersecurity. The difficulty with CFAA is that essentially, I don't mean to be flib when I'm saying this, but essentially the arguments for CFAA are, we need to reduce the DOJ's discretion. We need to reduce their ability to deal with computer hacking. In Washington Parlients, we need to water down computer hacking statutes. That framing is deadly. And I think we're all intellectual in this room enough to know that that's not actually what we're talking about. But until you defeat that framing, we're gonna have difficulty with CFAA reform, which we already saw from Goodlats bill, which actually made the CFAA worse. And there are a few ways on how you actually accomplish that. I think the easiest way is have a meeting with Chairman Rogers or John McCain or the other hawks on cyber issues. The ones who have been telling these members of Congress that the sky is falling. And convince them that the CFAA needs to be reformed. Convince them that we can more accurately target hacking through a statute that is nearly tailored towards that objective, rather than one that makes everyone in the United States a criminal. And if you have someone like John McCain or Chairman Rogers or Mac Thornberry making these arguments on the right, accompanied by other guys on the left, that's an argument that helps to defeat that narrative. Because if it's Chairman Rogers, the chair of the Intel committee, who's saying that this is actually gonna help us deal with computer hacking, then it's not watering down computer hacking statutes. And I'll take questions from you guys. To what extent trying to fracture the opposition is a valid strategy? I mean, MPAA and RIA would like to make everybody think they represent the entire content creation industry in the US, but I'm sure they don't have plenty of people who are content creators who agree with you and not with them. Same with cell phone companies. If you have Verizon, AT&T, and they want to prohibit unlocking, I bet every second, third tier cell carrier below them is in favor of it. So to what extent can you drive a wedge into the opposition? That's exactly right. When you find those actors put it in your back pocket. I was at the Consumer Electronics show. I was on the stage with Hank, with Public Enemy, and he was right next to me talking about my arguments as being pro-artist. I can say all day that my position's pro-artist. Having a actual artist say that these positions are pro-artist is much better than me saying it. You're absolutely right. The RIA's policies do not foster new innovation in the music industry or in the movie industry. They do not actually help their own clients, because they're in favor of their biggest clients over their new clients. And on the issue of the unlocking, there are over 100 wireless carriers in this country, and we were able to get, I think, is a hundred of them on our side, leaving AT&T and Verizon on the other side, which carefully wedged the issue as the big companies versus all the innovative companies or small businesses. So you're absolutely right. At the beginning, you sort of framed this as people who understand technology seem to get it and come out with things. Maybe this is self-referential, but. Well, and so I guess that kind of framing is perhaps a sort of an optimistic framing that suggests that if we can educate people, that then they might take more common sense approaches to dealing with, I would apologize on the legislative end. So I guess. Yes and no. Because if you're ignorant on Capitol Hill, that means that you listen to people that you trust. And unfortunately, the MPA and RA and Chamber of Commerce are the ones that people on Capitol Hill trust on content industry, content issues. So that ignorance means that they're not gonna question that logic. Push a little more cynically to say, what's your sense about people on Capitol Hill who regardless of whether they're ignorant or not, that even if they were educated and understood exactly what the technology, how it works and what it means, that ultimately what they care about is that the RIA and MPA know people who can give them money. And ultimately that's what's important is the reelection cycle. And ultimately getting the technology right or wrong is less important than ensuring that your Congress. Well, I didn't mean to imply that everyone Capitol Hill is ignorant. There's many members of Congress who get it. And there are some members of Congress who get it and do exactly what you're saying. So Marsha Blackburn comes to mind. She's from Nashville, Tennessee. I'm sure she understands the issues. She's on the other side of the issues. She called my paper radical. That's her perspective. So there are people on the other side who do get the issues. But for the most part you have Zolufgren, Jared Paulus, Darrell Issa, Chapit, Senator Moran, Senator Wyden. Those are kind of the guys who understand tech policy in the collective. Both left and right, Senate and House. And they all kind of agree on many of the issues at hand. So I think that there is some issues as far as that coffers argument goes and campaign funding, but that doesn't explain why on the right Republicans support these policies. Because the NPA, RA, Hollywood is very, very left leaning. So if it's what you're saying, then why are Republicans against it? So I think the story is a little bit more complicated. I don't know enough about left politics that may explain why some Democrats are the way they are. I just know from my perspective, it doesn't explain why Republicans are the way they are. That's the last I've heard. I've been working with their office, talking with their office, and the last I've heard is they're planning on introducing a bill. Why is the RA and the NPA so politically powerful? I mean, I've heard a lot of arguments saying, look, the tech companies in terms of market capitalization are so much larger. They're like, well, Google and Apple probably each have enough cash on hand to buy the entire recording industry, but they don't seem to have the political power. Is this just sort of lack of experience? So I'm not an expert on this. There's people who know these issues better. But 18T and Verizon are both the top 10 lobbying companies in the United States. They spend $32 million. If I remember correctly, Google spends $6 million. Google is the number two biggest company in the United States, right? Or up there, depending on how you rank in, see who's paying, what taxes offshore. They're a big company. 18T and Verizon are not nearly as big. So it's where you place your priorities, right? And no tech company really had a DC presence until Microsoft. When Microsoft was about to be broken up, they suddenly decided that they needed to invest in lobbyists. And they stayed in DC. And since then, other companies have also done so. But none of them have really done so to the extent that Microsoft has. So I would argue that in general, tech companies do not spend comparable resources to the content industry anywhere near close, particularly given their overwhelming size. So either in dollars to dollars or in percentages. So if Silicon Valley really decided that's what they wanted to do, they could do so. The other problem is that when you find a lot of these tech companies, because they know that they're new to the game, they're very careful in the battles that they wage. So if you're a tech company and you figured your way through patent law, why would you want to reform patent law? If you're Apple or Microsoft or even Google, why would you want to reform patent law? Now, you know as these companies how screwed up patent law is. But you've invested so much money in your current system to manipulate patent law, I'm sorry, to survive patent law that there's no incentive for you to be saying we should have wholesale patent law change. Those are my initial thoughts. Oh, the other problem is the RA and MPAA, their funding mechanism is in such a unique way that they kind of only exist for this purpose. So when they sue kids and they make a million dollars, that million dollars doesn't go back to the artist. It goes back to their coffers to pay for new lobbyists. They, when Spotify entered the United States, there was like a four year negotiation period. And that was mainly quibbling to my understanding over equity, because the content company said, if you want to enter the United States, you have to give up equity in your company, which is kind of in my mind extortion. And Spotify entered the United States and gave away 8% of their equity to the record companies. Now those record companies have told me that none of that money will ever go back to the artist. So these are ways that are kind of self-funding this lobbying campaign, whereas the tech industry in Seattle, they have to justify, should we be spending this much money on lobbying through Microsoft or with Google? So it doesn't have the same funding stream. National trade agreements and how the myth that's been spurned is that it hurts U.S. innovation. I'm originally from Pakistan, I spent about 23 years of my life there and first year is rampart. As in, I had a phone call with a friend of mine last week who said the submarine cable got cut and the telco blocked in turns and he couldn't watch an episode of Game of Thrones. And so my argument to you is, none of those people will pay for this content in the current business model anyways. But I've seen how it does affect U.S. innovation as in these are massive number of consumers that consume this content and never pay for any of this. And so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts or what you said about how it doesn't hurt innovation or how it's a myth kind of thing? Well, I didn't mean to say it was a myth, piracy is real. But in those examples, those are textbook law sales because they wouldn't have bought the content anyways. And we give intellectual conversations in this room on the impact on piracy. My point is on Capitol Hill, it's a non-starter. Piracy is real, costs millions of American jobs. If you do anything that threatens that, you're kind of out of luck. So I'm not quibbling with whether or not there is a problem of piracy. But I think that the obsession with piracy is the problem. So I did a few years in retail, which was terrible. I advise everyone to do a few years in retail so that way they decide everything else from the rest of their life is better. And we have on the wall, the shrink rate, the amount of merchandise that was gonna walk out of that store. There's about 5% the store I went to, which is actually pretty good. So the idea that in the record industry or the movie industry, any piracy is the sky falling, is kind of erroneous. Every industry deals with theft. Every industry deals with these problems. And in the case of retail, they've actually paid money for the garment. So they actually are, it's a net, it's a different economic equation. So they're actually, merchandise is walking out of there that they've actually, it has a physical product to it. So that's my point on piracy, is that piracy is real. But if your conversation's only on the topic of piracy, that doesn't justify a copyright term of life plus 70 years. Or these fair use laws that are absurd. And what happens is these fair use laws are so absurd that if you have a new business model that deals with content, one side of the Rubicon is you have this profitable thriving business model named Ario. The other side of the Rubicon is you're liable for a trillion dollars in damages. So, and you don't always know where that line is, that line is defined by the courts. Could you imagine going to a venture capitalist and saying, okay, so it's like a 50% chance here that we have this brilliant product or a 50% chance that we're going to be bankrupted in courts. That's not how innovation happens. That's a chilling effect upon innovation. So that's my argument. About the role of public interest groups, like EFF and public knowledge and how you see them fitting into where you'd like the small incremental movements on Capitol Hill to go. Yeah. So I'm big fans of public knowledge and EFF. Their interest is in talking about all the issues that affect innovation and technology. And I think that you need something to supplement that. So public knowledge puts out a lot of good and bill texts, how you can actually introduce a bill tomorrow to fix this problem. That's awesome. But we need something more strategic to be taking some of the activists and the players already out there in the community to engage through the kind of lobbying processes. I say lobbying, you know, because I don't like lobbying. I think that there's lobbying 2.0 that you can utilize here. But I don't think EFF has done some of that. But there's other organizations and people that can mount these kind of grassroots campaigns on these niche issues. I fix it. Mobilizing hundreds of thousands of service steps on these kind of issues. And we can talk jobs in every area. I think there's lots of jobs out there for people that are unlocking phones. You got Resilular in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Unlocking five million cell phones a year. And we're going to play hundreds of people. It's very easy that local level, look at the jobs on local level and build it up. Cool. A more generically strategic question. We've been talking a lot about McAfee and framing and I completely agree that it's super important. But you were mentioning how critical it was for the cell phone movement that you got to that sort of visually magic number on the petition and then all of a sudden, the media wanted to talk to you. And that makes sense. What I'm wondering is seen in conjunction with the Sonsui and what's accumulated a series of small winnable victories rather than going for the grandstand flood, are you going to run into a sort of, what have you done for me lately thing? Let's say that the next thing, whatever it is, you get to 100,000, like 100,000, I've seen that before. If you want to take our calls, excuse me, receive our calls this time, it needs to be 150,000. And the next time, it needs to be two, et cetera. Will you have to keep winning bigger and bigger or can you exist at this level for a while suddenly building support? I think you can exist at this level for a while, although there were some other petitions that happened after us, such as on SISPA. But you have to be very strategic. So on the accessibility stuff, if we mount a campaign like this on accessibility, there are natural allies to utilize in that battle. The association for the blind and associations for the deaf are just natural allies. And if you hit that 100,000 barometer on that, and the White House has to weigh in about why we're denying persons who are blind and deaf technology that can help them, good luck to them. And if we're very lucky, we get a hearing on that issue. And so I feel like there's ways to continue on some of these small issues if you're strategic about it. But then, yeah, you're gonna have to move to some bigger battles. I mean, you wanna take on CFA reform. That's a big battle. That could be a year or two year or five year battle. But I think that this is gonna be step one in a longer term process on that road. About multi-stakeholder relationships in terms of the US when they went for Wicked, they advocated for this. But domestically, it's been very difficult to form. And so like the CCI for copyright has a multi-stakeholder relationship with the NPA and the ISPs, there's also GG Sones and part of it from public knowledge and stuff like that. What the importance of such a relationship is or what your thoughts are on it? I know GG pretty well. Yeah, I mean, you need to have as many allies in the community as possible and gain from their expertise. So GG's been doing this a lot longer than I have. There's technology, legal scholars who know these issues better than I do. But you need people who can kind of connect the dots too. So again, on the unlocking issue, I feel like one of my added values was demonstrating it that's making you liable for five years in prison. That required a added level of legal analysis that I was able to accomplish because of the multi-stakeholders because I knew other people who could confirm my analysis and could say, if I got challenged on it, I could point to a Harvard professor, a Yale Law professor, a Stanford professor, and a few other professors to say like, I don't take my word for it. We have all these other people in the community. So I think that there's rules for all these different, did that answer your question? So my point was that instead of fighting all these big people and raising, being on one side rather than working with them and then finding a better way to move forward because like GG's working with AT&T Verizon and the MPA and representing a really good front for the consumers. I think that there are times where you can work with them. So an issue that's near and dear to my heart is the issue of alien works. I don't know how familiar all of you guys are with alien works, but essentially when copyright, there was a period of time where these copyrighted goods went in the public domain. And then the Sunny Bono Act, they decided to take those goods in the public domain and put them back under copyright. And as a result of that, but also other issues, but the large part of that, we don't know who their descendants are today who should inherit those royalties. And so as a result, they're called the alien works because no one can use them, no one can benefit from them. Orphan works? Orphan works. Sorry, that's exactly what I meant. Sorry. Okay. Orphan works. Someone's gonna tweet about that. Yeah, so that's a problem where we, our interests are aligned with the RAAs, or I would argue are, not necessarily, we're aligned at least with the RAAs' interests, which is that they want these holders to be compensated and want more content, we want more content to be available. We may quibble about how to do it, but if people in the REA wanted to work with me on Orphan Works, that's terrific. And there are a whole bunch of questions, so. I've heard some discussions about the internet freedom movement as being sort of analogous to the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s in terms of people on different issues, but not having formed under a coherent banner. Do you think that metaphor is accurate? How would you frame it? That's a, I'm not an expert on the environmental movement, but I think there's lessons to be learned from all these movement politics issues. MoveOn.org was the first group that utilized online tools for movement politics. And since then, there have been many others. MoveOn.org actually was, I think, in 1998. They were over Bill Clinton's impeachment, many people don't know that. So there's a lot of lessons to be learned in the environmental movement. It could be one of them, although I would wonder what went off the rails and what could be learned from their successes and their failures. Because I think that in the past 10, 15 years, there hasn't been very much progress in their front. But I think that all these movements can teach us positive things. I'm interested in those Republican groups that endorsed their copyright memo and the Republicans who called you a Marxist and got you fired. Just give a schism in conservative thinking about copyright reform. And it looks like there is. And how does that map onto the schism of a Republican party trying to regroup after the last election? So I haven't seen so much of a schism. I mean, I know the guys who called me a Marxist and it wasn't an intellectual argument. It was, I was told to come this meeting, call you a Marxist. So the best argument I've heard, and I'm always interested in counterarguments, the best argument I've heard against the memo is the natural rights argument, which is that copyright should exist forever. Federal government shouldn't be touching it. It existed before the Constitution. The federal government shouldn't be involved. You can't limit copyright. That's an intellectual law school journal argument. It's just not the system that we've adopted either in the United Kingdom or so Great Britain or in the United States. It's actually a argument that our founding fathers rejected. They rejected it on the national level. They rejected it in 14 colonies and then states. They rejected it at Supreme Court level. So that's the natural rights counterargument that I've heard. So I don't see the schism so far. But there are certain issues supported in this memo. Absolutely. Does that give hope to a left-right coalition for copyright enforcement? I think so. Is there any realistic hope there? You say we don't have any of the email addresses of the people who signed the petition. Is there a growing coalition where we do have email addresses? What are we actually having to say? So we have no organization to do that. I would like to build that. I've been trying to figure out funding to do that. But again, that's a long-term battle. It's one thing for me to write that memo when I was in Congress because we had 175 members who could theoretically support that the next day. And I thought that was a worthwhile coalition to move forward on these issues on. But out of Congress, that's a longer-term battle and that's going to require developing the apparatus on because you're talking about many billion dollars of assets at stake. I mean, if the RA estimates that the impact of my reforms would cost their industry $10 billion, why wouldn't they spend a billion dollars lobbying? Tom, sorry. So talking about the email addresses, so you don't have those 114,000 email addresses, but the White House does. So did you get any conservative pushback for using the White House petition platform? I got some pushback. I don't know how much of it was conservative pushback. I got a lot of privacy pushback. But yeah, there were some conservatives who didn't want the White House to have their email information. In small battles, and then the other side, whatever that other side might be, then follows up with something more drastic. And my example here is the recent Supreme Court rule of our first doctrine. We don't first sell doctrine. We don't know yet what the content owners are going to do next, but it's probably going to be drastic. So when we make small strides, how can we defend to be prepared for the next big terrible thing that's going to come out? Is there anything we can do to prepare? So that's a good point. So we should be willing to pay defense even on the big battles, but we need to be strategic on the offensive battles. I'm not sure if I buy your premise that they're going to introduce, if they're going to try for a sustained push to reverse the first sale doctrine, like Kurt's saying. But yeah, you do need to have your eyes open. But if you want to take on a big battle like on SISPA without that coalition, it's difficult. So right now with the SISPA stuff, it seems like you shouldn't pass SISPA because of the privacy concerns. And I get that. But cybersecurity versus privacy, cybersecurity probably wins. You need to figure out a strategic argument that says, this has privacy concerns and this is ineffective to deal with cybersecurity optimally and here's a better solution. So that's kind of what I meant. What would you have us do in the short term? Do you have anything in particular that we can engage in or push forward? Sure, and so my short term goals are, I want to figure out what actors who rose up during SISPA would like to be part of a new move in coalition going forward to fight on these small scale battles. And we have a website which is called LegalizedTech.com that we haven't launched. And its premise is just that technology that doesn't have an infringing purpose should be legal, which I think is a interim battle along the way. But if you're interested in kind of connecting those dots, connect with me. If you're interested in helping with some of these campaigns or if you think that accessibility technology for the blind is important, those are kind of the next battles that I'm mounting up for.