 Welcome, everybody, and welcome to Edward Lee. Edward Lee is a professor of law and the director in the program in intellectual property law at IIT Chicago Kent College of Law. He's a graduate of Williams College and of this fine institution of Harvard Law School. He's written extensively about copyright, the internet, free speech, and the history of freedom of the press. And he's here to us to talk today about the fight for the future and the SOPA PIPA debates as a compliment to a lot of the work that has been done as well in terms of studying SOPA PIPA on the Media Cloud team at Berkman. So welcome to Edward. Great. Thank you, Amir, and thank you to the Berkman Center for inviting me to come speak today. And thank you to everybody in the room for sacrificing some of your day to be a part of this lecture. And thank you to the people on the internet who are watching by webcast. And on personal note, it's a great delight to be back in Cambridge on this really beautiful fall day. I had a chance to look at the new building. It was kind of blown away. I don't know if people realize that it today is actually Guy Fawkes Day. So happy Guy Fawkes Day to anybody who celebrates it. And it's actually the two-year anniversary of the beginning of the SOPA debate. So many of the key events that I'll be talking about today sort of occurred starting two years ago in November of 2011. Now I actually want to begin with a story that I'm sure most of the people in the room are familiar with, especially being in Massachusetts. It's a story about a silversmith living in colonial America who made a famous ride on the night of April 18, 1775. The ride began in Charleston, Massachusetts, and ended up in Lexington, some 13 miles away, lasting approximately two hours, and ending near midnight. And of course, this famous ride of Paul Revere has become the subject of legends. So everybody knows one if I land, two if I. Excellent. The British are coming. The British are coming. As the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, so through the night wrote Paul Revere, and so through the night went his cry of alarm to every middle-sex village in the farm, a cry of defiance and not of fear, a voice in the darkness and not at the door, and a word that shall echo forevermore. Now there's a small problem with this famous account. It's not true. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fisher wrote, this romantic idea of Paul Revere's ride is etched indelibly upon national memory, but it is not what actually happened that night. Many other riders helped Paul Revere to carry the alarm. Now even more important than debunking the myth surrounding Paul Revere's ride, Professor Fisher goes on in his book to describe precisely why the American system of communication was so effective in sounding the alarm about the British troops that night. As Fisher describes it, the American system was a decentralized network. It was a network that was coordinated through an openly disorderly network of Congresses and committees, but it had no central authority. It enlisted its churches and ministers, its physicians and lawyers, so hats up to all the lawyers in the room. Our profession played a part in this. It's family networks and voluntary associations. If we depicted the American system of communication on a network graph, it would look something like this, with Paul Revere tapping into the existing communities of Massachusetts and others doing the same as well. And of course, this is just a simulation. This is not to scale, but you kind of get the picture of what's going on in Massachusetts at the time. Now I wanna take some liberties for today's talk and characterize what you've just seen as a Revere-style network. It was a network that worked from the bottom up to mobilize people quickly, at least quickly for the time period. And the Midnight Riders and Paul Revere were then able to tap into the local groups and communities and the people in those communities were then able to sound the alarm about the incoming British troops. And they did so in whatever way they could think of, Bell's guns, drums, or the proverbial lantern in the church tower. And this helped to mobilize the American militia, which scored an important first victory at the battles of Lexington and Concord at the start of the American Revolution. And this was in star contrast to the British system of communication in America at the time, which was completely centralized. It was a top-down model. And if we depicted the British system of communication, it would look something like this or like this with General Thomas Gage reporting to one other member of the British Army. And of course, if that message sent by Thomas Gage did not reach its recipient, the message was lost. And that actually happened at a key moment before the battles of Lexington and Concord. Now, some of you may be wondering, what does this lesson of American history have to do with a fight for the future of the internet? Well, if you bear with me just for a couple more minutes, I hope to be able to connect the dots. So now fast forward to January 18th, 2012 at midnight. We're almost two years away from that historic event. When we saw the largest internet blackout in history, perhaps best symbolized by this image, and I'm sure that some of you saw this image on that day, the image of Wikipedia blacking out all of its English language web pages around the world for a full 24 hours. Imagine a world without free knowledge. Wikipedia wasn't the only one. Google blacked out its logo for the first time ever in political protest. Reddit, the social news sharing site blacked out. Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, Craigslist, Wired Magazine, WordPress blogs. Over 115,000 websites blacked out that day in a form of self censorship. Many of them were just individual blogs, but some of them were the most traffic sites in the United States and indeed the most traffic sites in the world in the case of Google and Wikipedia. And they were all blacking out as a form of protest to sound the alarm about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was Congress's latest and greatest efforts to combat online piracy of copyrighted content. And even though SOPA had numerous provisions, the provision that produced the greatest reaction was the provision that would have authorized the Attorney General to go to court and based on a simple showing of probable cause that a foreign website was engaged in criminal copyright infringement, obtained that order and direct internet servers providers in the United States to cut off that domain name from its IP address, essentially blocking Americans access to that foreign website based on this simple showing of probable cause. And people feared that there would be a lot of collateral damage created by this system which seemed to lack due process or procedural safeguards to make sure that only illegitimate sites were being blocked. Nevertheless, this had the widespread support of the entertainment industry which spent $91 million lobbying on SOPA's behalf just by the date of the first hearing November 16th. The entertainment industry had been lobbying hard for greater enforcement mechanisms to clamp down on online piracy for some time. And this had a who's who's list of Hollywood studios, media conglomerates, multinational corporations supporting SOPA. So not surprisingly, this had widespread support in Congress. 32 co-sponsors in the House, 42 co-sponsors in the Senate, which is almost an unheard of number, nearly half the senators wanted to be associated with the bill as sponsors, you know, have their name attached to the bill. It's quite remarkable. And even outside of the co-sponsors, there was strong bipartisan support in Congress. So I think it was pretty much fair to say when the bill was first introduced in October of 2011, it was a slam dunk to pass. Not only that, but it was on a fast track to pass Congress, potentially in that year of 2011. But then something miraculous happened the day after the blackout, January 19th. SOPA had become toxic. It had become essentially a four letter word. Nobody wanted to be associated with it any longer. For the first time in the entire debate about SOPA, on January 19th, the number of opponents outnumbered the number of supporters of SOPA. And it actually, if you look at the figures, it tripled on that day, the number of opponents to SOPA tripled in a 24 hour period during the blackout. And even more remarkably, some of the co-sponsors ended up opposing the bill they sponsored. It was kind of crazy. One of them was Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who's touted to be one of the future presidential candidates of the Republican Party. On the day of the blackout, he came out on his Facebook page and said, we need to protect the free and open access to the internet and SOPA was a threat. Likewise, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, Chris Dodd, who is a former senator, admitted to the New York Times the day after the blackout, this is altogether a new effect. And he said that he had never seen anything like this in his 40 years of politics, something that had such strong support changed into such strong opposition in a 24 hour period. And he likened this online protest to the Arab Spring, in which we saw several Middle Eastern countries have political protests and in some cases revolutions based in part on organizations through Facebook and Twitter. Now, my view is that Senator Dodd is not entirely correct. He's correct in part, but not entirely correct. What we saw on January 18th is similar to what we saw on April 18th, 1775. In both cases, we had a revere style network, a decentralized network to sound the alarm, but instead of horses, we now have websites to help us sound the alarm and mobilize people from the bottom up. And if we look at some of the figures from that day, it was quite staggering. So millions of people voiced their opposition to SOPA in this 24 hour period. Eight million people looked up their members of Congress contact information on a directory that Wikipedia created remarkably in 48 hours. They worked around the clock to create this directory so people could find the contact information for their member of Congress. Senators' websites crashed on that day from all the traffic directed to their sites. 10 million people signed petitions to Congress against SOPA. Seven million of those signatures were obtained by Google's petition. Three million emails were sent to Congress through internet non-profits' websites, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And there were over 100,000 phone calls made to Congress, facilitated in part by some of the internet non-profits' websites. And even though that number is the smallest number, the phone calls, it actually may have been the most important number. Because as Representative Zoe Lofgren of Silicon Valley continually advised the opposition to SOPA, you need to melt the phone lines if you want to make an impact in Congress. The human voice is far more powerful than any petition online or any email that you send. And sure enough on that day, people melted the phone lines to Congress, phones of members of Congress were ringing off the hook, basically. And if you look at other analytics from January 18th, they were also off the charts. So here's a search for SOPA on that day on January 18th. You can see it peaks. And if you look at the scale, you can't actually see the numbers, but it peaks on a scale of 100. It hit the 100 mark on Google Analytics, on Twitter. Twitter was a fire with discussion about SOPA. So 3.5% of all tweets that day were related to SOPA, which for a copyright professor like me, it's sort of remarkable that the masses are talking about a copyright bill. We had really never seen this kind of mass discussion, public discussion about a copyright bill before. And if we look at the universe of tweets that day on a graph, it looks something like this, and this is provided by Fred Berenson. And who were the people receiving the most tweets about SOPA that day? And that's depicted in the blue. The larger the blue circle, the more tweets they're receiving about SOPA. So it's the White House. It's the chief sponsor of SOPA, Lamar Smith, and the chief opponent of SOPA in the house, Darrell Issa. So there's a lot of conversation with the key members of Congress and with the White House about SOPA that day on Twitter. It was remarkable. And even Kim Kardashian got involved in this fight. She said we must stop SOPA and keep the web open and free. Provides a link to the Wikipedia page that provides a set of facts about the SOPA bill and asks people to fight this legislation. A funny kind of anecdote is that one of the internet activists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation who had been working against SOPA from the start back in October of 2011, he said that when he saw Kardashian's tweet, he knew they had won. All right. The message that they had been working so hard to get out from back in October finally had trickled out to the masses and now Kim Kardashian was a part of the fight on their side. And not surprisingly then, two days later after the blackout, SOPA was shelved and it's been shelved indefinitely. In fact, members of Congress want to know if the next copyright bill is a SOPA and if it is, they don't want anything to do with it because there's a stigma attached to the name SOPA now. Now I think this is an incredible story of civic engagement about people getting involved in this policy debate and no matter where you stand on the actual bill itself if you oppose it or you supported it, this still shows I think a great moment of democracy in action when people actually got involved in this debate. And in itself, I think this would be an incredible story to tell. And this were the only story to tell today. I could just stop here and we could have lunch together. I could join you in lunch. But it's actually not the only story to tell. Just as we saw in the Arab Spring when protests in one Middle Eastern country helped to spark protests in another Middle Eastern country we saw the same thing happening with SOPA, the SOPA protests. So on February 11th, 2012, the SOPA protests this is just less than a month away from the internet blackout. The SOPA protests helped to spark protests in the European Union. In fact, in all 27 countries of the European Union in over 250 cities involving over 100,000 people and in the European Union people are really serious about protests. They don't just have an online protest. They protest in the streets. So 100,000 people marched in the streets in the middle of winter and often in freezing temperatures. And they were protesting something called ACTA, the Anti-Contrafeiting Trade Agreement, which was an agreement that was being pushed by the United States, Japan, the European Union and other developed countries to try to ratchet up enforcement against online piracy and counterfeiting of trademark goods. And even though ACTA and SOPA were different, many people would say ACTA wasn't nearly as bad as SOPA. ACTA didn't have, for instance, the controversial domain name blocking feature of SOPA. People readily associated the two together as a form of greater policing of the internet that could lead to a lot of collateral damage and impinge upon people's internet freedoms. So that was the connection that people made between the two bills or trade agreements. And you can see this connection being made on this dramatic photo from Klujnopoko, Romania in which on this protest sign, you might not be able to see it clearly in this room, but it says ACTA, SOPA, TMI. Too much information. And this revolution will not be televised. It will, of course, be tweeted. And another dramatic thing to look at in terms of the photo is, look how cold it is. I mean, there's snow, mountains of snow behind this young woman, and she's draped in a scarf and a winter gear. If you go to Google Image Search and search for ACTA protests, you can see even more dramatic photos of the protest in many of these 250 cities. Or better yet, if you go on to YouTube and search for ACTA protests, you can find dramatic video footage of many of the protests with people marching in the streets and sometimes jumping up and down in unison, shouting no to ACTA. It was quite remarkable. So this story, this part of the story is a story of civic engagement, twice over or maybe 27 times over. It had never happened before, just in the case of the SOPA protests, the ACTA protests, we had never seen a concerted, demonstrated set of protests in all 27 countries of the European Union, and that led the European Union parliament to vote down ratification of ACTA there by an overwhelming vote of 478 against 39, only 39 in favor. So this is an incredible story of people getting involved in this policy debate over intellectual property laws. So what are the lessons that we can draw from the protests of 2012? Well, I think one very simple lesson is don't mess with the internet. The internet community has been by and large a sleeping giant in a lot of the intellectual property debates, but this debate over SOPA and ACTA sparked a great reaction among millions of people who feared that their freedoms that they enjoyed on the internet could be jeopardized by a set of internet policing that lacked procedural safeguards. So that's lesson number one. Lesson number two is we the people can actually make a difference. And I know this sounds a little bit cliche, but it's actually true. I think the 2012 protests validated this point. People were fighting for the free and open internet. That's a concept that's not being defined by courts, at least not yet. It's a concept not being defined by Congress. Our Congress can't even agree on a budget, so we can't expect them to pass something about internet freedoms. It's being actually defined by people. So as Aaron Swartz, the late precocious internet programmer who said in one of his last public speeches before his untimely death, we won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom, this freedom of the internet. They did whatever they could think of to do. They didn't stop to ask anyone for permission. The senators were right. The internet really is out of control. But what do people really know? Some people out there might be thinking, well, what do people really know? The millions who got involved, most of them were not lawyers, most of them were not law students. So many of you in the room know more about copyright law, know more about First Amendment law than the vast majority of people who protested. So there was actually one theory out there that millions of people were simply misinformed about SOPA and misinformed about ACTA. So in terms of the SOPA debate, actually the chief sponsor in the Senate, Senator Leahy, said a day after the blackout, there was a lot of false information going on and that's why there was this blackout. Likewise, Stephanie Moore, the Democratic Chief Counsel in the House Judiciary Committee said even in starker terms, the internet response was orchestrated by misinformation. Netizens did poison the well, blaming internet activists and other people in the internet community. Now before you dismiss this kind of view out of hand, I think it's important to recognize this kind of view traces back to the founding of our country. It's very reminiscent of a debate that occurred at the framing of our country. When James Madison in this famous essay, who are the best keepers of the people's liberties, engaged in a kind of faux debate between the leading political parties of the day and on the one side, there were the anti-Republicans or Federalists who answered the question this way. The people are stupid, suspicious, licentious. They cannot safely trust themselves. They should think of nothing but obedience, leaving the care of their liberties to their wiser rulers. So this view that Leahy and Moore express I think has a pedigree dating back to the founding of our country. But on the other side, there's another view called the popular constitutional view. And under this view, the people's view of the constitution and individual liberties reign supreme. So to go back to the debate that Madison held, for the Republican side, the people themselves are the best protectors over their liberties. The sacred trust can be nowhere so safe as in the hands most interested in preserving it. Now my view is that the popular constitutional view better explains what happened in the SOPA debate. The people's view of free speech as translated into this concept of the free and open internet reign supreme. And it reign supreme even though there were highly technical legal memos prepared by our top First Amendment lawyers. So Floyd Abrams prepared a memo saying there was no First Amendment problem. Harvard's own Lawrence Tribe, Professor Tribe wrote a memo saying there was a First Amendment violation created potentially by SOPA. Those highly technical legal memos did not carry the popular debate. Nor did for that matter, the Supreme Court's jurisprudence about the First Amendment. Whether we should apply intermediate scrutiny or strict scrutiny to this SOPA bill, that didn't carry the debate either. Instead, what people applied was a more common sense notion of scrutiny. What they heard about SOPA scared them that it could equal censorship on the internet. And under that common sense test, SOPA flunked. There was too great a likelihood of censorship created by SOPA. So that's lesson number two. The third and final lesson that I wanna share with you today is the power of social media. And I think you've already seen some of that in the examples that I talked about earlier. And there are so many examples I could talk about. I don't even talk about half of them in my book. But today in the interest of time, I'll just talk about two, and actually two of my favorite ones. So the first one is probably my most favorite example of all. And that's involving a college student, a 21-year-old college student from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, named Ryan Birchie. And at that time of the SOPA debate, he said he was never political. You could barely get this guy to vote is the way that he put it. But then he read something about SOPA and it really disturbed him. So in his kind of youthful exuberance, he decided he should get involved. And in his words, take it straight to the top, meaning President Obama. So he wrote President Obama a petition. And luckily we have a president who actually set up a system under the we the people. Anybody can write in to President Obama. And if you get a certain number of signatures, back then it was 25,000, President Obama will respond to you. So Ryan Birchie writes, SOPA is a censorship law that would end the internet as we know it, post this petition and provides a link to it on Reddit. It gets 25,000 signatures in no time. It gets 50,000 in a month. And somebody else posted a similar petition to asking President Obama to veto SOPA and it got over 50,000 as well. So over 100,000 signatures asking President Obama to oppose SOPA. And some of you may be wondering, well, what does this 21 year old college student gonna do to influence President Obama? Well, President Obama had been on the sidelines for a long time in the SOPA debate, kind of torn between Hollywood which strongly supported SOPA and Silicon Valley which strongly opposed it. But Obama finally comes out, the administration comes out on January 14th, a few days before the blackout. And the Obama administration says, we must guard against the risk of online censorship and SOPA was a potential threat to that. So echoing some of the same things that Ryan Birchie did and said in this petition and echoing some of the same themes that the opposition had been mounting or raising since the start of the opposition back in October of 2011. So this is a great victory for the online or the grassroots movement. Second example of the effective use of social media comes from a group in Massachusetts. So it's great to be back in Massachusetts. We're in the western end of Massachusetts this time where four internet activists, Tiffany Chang, Holmes Wilson, Nick Rebel and Dean Jansen have come together to organize a group a nonprofit called Fight for the Future. And this group is organized specifically to oppose SOPA, to stop SOPA. That's how much they feared this bill. The name of their first campaign was called Free Bieber. And sorry to disappoint some of you in the room, Bieber is not actually behind bars. But that was the strategy of the Fight for the Future group was try to make more concrete who the collateral damage would be under this bill. And their interpretation of the commercial felony streaming act, which would have criminalized unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content of a value of $1,000 or more, would have made criminal what Justin Bieber did at the age of 12 to become discovered. So I don't know if people realize how Bieber was discovered. He posted videos of himself singing other people's copyrighted music presumably without permission and without licenses to become discovered and sure enough, he was discovered. So that was the example for their first campaign to show that this would be potentially collateral damage under the SOPA bill. So they asked people to sign the petition and then 200,000 people signed the petition. An incredible amount for their first campaign, an unknown nonprofit group getting 200,000 people to sign the petition. How do they do that? Well, they use social media. So one big boost to the Free Bieber petition was provided by a YouTuber named Sexy Phil. And Sexy Phil is basically a person who comments on the news, but he routinely gets over a million views to his videos. And this one got nearly two million views. And he did so in a way that's sort of like Jimmy Fallon in the kind of a comedic way. He provided a link to the Free Bieber petition and he talked about it in his video and he talked why we should oppose the Bieber bill or the SOPA, Commercial Felony Streaming Act and sure enough that provided a big boost to the Free Bieber campaign. But the biggest boost to the Free Bieber campaign came directly from Bieber himself who said when he heard about this bill, he said this bill is ridiculous. He was actually asked about this bill by a DJ in Washington, DC. And it's sort of only in DC would you ask Bieber about copyright law, but sure enough they asked him about this. And Bieber actually said even more, the bill's sponsor should be locked up and put away in handcuffs. And that provided a big boost to the Free Bieber campaign and the blogosphere went wild and mainstream media started reporting this and Bieber fan sites got involved. So the Beliebers were now a part of this debate about SOPA and it just provided a big boost to the Fight for the Future's first campaign. Okay, so those are some of the lessons I think we can learn from the protest of 2012. What next? Where do we go from here? Well, some of the internet nonprofits including Fight for the Future have organized what they call an internet defense league. The basic idea is that we need to be more prepared for threats, potential threats to internet freedoms than we were before. People were taken by surprise about how aggressive the SOPA bill was or what ACTO would do in the European Union. So this is supposed to make people more vigilant. You can sign up on their listserv and they will propagate this cat symbol kind of like the bat symbol. You've got to hand it to the internet community. They have a really good sense of humor so they'll send out this cat symbol when there's a threat to internet freedoms. They just did this cat symbol recently for the NSA surveillance and they held a protest in Washington D.C. that had over 2,000 people protesting the NSA surveillance. Okay, now in Congress we have two of the leaders who are against SOPA fighting for an internet bill of rights. So Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Darrell Issa have actually proposed this internet bill of rights in Congress and they did so in the day of the blackout. So included in those rights are the right to a free and open internet freedom from censorship and you can actually go to their website keepthewebopen.com and provide comments to this bill to make it better through crowdsourcing. But I think you can tell from what I've just said that everything really is still up for grabs in terms of internet freedoms. Despite the incredible successes that the grassroots movement had in terms of stopping SOPA and stopping ACTA, all of that effort was defensive to stop a bad bill or to stop a bad trade agreement. None of it was conversion into a court decision recognizing internet freedoms or an act of Congress recognizing protections for internet freedoms or even less likely a constitutional amendment specifically protecting internet freedom. So it's all up for grabs in terms of internet freedoms. And I think I only need to mention three letters to drive that point home. NSA, surveilling our emails as we speak. But I think this presents us with a profound challenge and an incredible opportunity. And I speak especially to the law students and other students in the room. You will be our future leaders of internet policy and policies in other areas of law for that matter that affect individual freedoms. You too can be like Paul Revere and the Midnight Riders and sound the alarm about freedoms that we all hold dear and join in in a common effort in the cause of freedom to go back to to borrow the words again from Professor Fisher's book. And I know some of you are probably not into politics. It's easy not to be into politics in this country when our Congress shuts down the federal government for 16 days when they can't agree on a budget. But you really don't need to be into politics to be aware of politics and to be aware of, for instance, this cat symbol or other warning signs to you of potential threats to individual freedoms. And then you might get involved, maybe it's for the first time you might get involved and email your member of Congress or better yet, use that smartphone that you're always on and melt the phone line to your member of Congress to express your view about a policy debate that affects you and others in this country. And I know I think that I might at the Berkman Center be in a room full of at least many true believers in terms of internet freedoms. But maybe there were some people out there on the internet watching in the webcast who are still skeptical about this fight asking well why should they get involved in this fight and why did millions of people get involved in the fight in 2012? Well, in trying to answer this question, I was reminded of a passage that Professor Fisher had in his book recounting an interview of a captain in the American militia who has asked this question why he fought in the American Revolution and why he went to the battlefield. And they first asked him well, Captain Preston was at the Stamp Act, the notorious act of Britain that required all printed materials in the United States to be printed on special paper, essentially a tax on printing. And Captain Preston said, I don't have any stamps. And then they asked him again, well, what was it? Was it the t-tax? The tax on t that led to the Boston Tea Party that in which Paul Revere and others dumped tea into the Boston Harbor, not too far away from here. And Captain Preston said, I don't like tea. They asked him again, well, what was it, Captain Preston? Was it the writings on individual liberty by John Locke and other political theorists of the day? And Captain Preston said, I don't know those guys. Said, what was it, Captain Preston? What got you to the battlefield to fight? And here's what he said. We had always governed ourselves in America and we'd always meant to. The British didn't mean we should, and that's why we fought. And that's why I fought. And I think in a similar way, that's what we saw in 2012, why millions of people got involved, fighting for this concept of the freedom of the internet. People were fighting for this internet that they were born with. A decentralized network, a Revere-style network, a network that looked like this and not like this, the top-down model, controlled by one government, or controlled by one corporation, or several corporations. People were trying to fight against this and they feared SOPA and ACTA would lead something closer to that. Now I'm gonna end here, and I wanna end on a note of optimism, even though it's still up for grabs in terms of our internet freedoms. If you think about what happened, what we saw in 2012, with we the people making a difference and the power of social media, social media giving us incredible tools to help us fight for those internet freedoms, this fight for the future of the internet is really ours to win. We just need to make it happen. Thank you. Okay, great, I will open it up for questions. Anybody have any questions? And I also should say, on my website you can get a free copy of this on the about section and there are ebook copies on Amazon and there's a print copy coming out this month. So just check back to the website too. Yes. Well, I have a couple of comments and some questions. First of all, I noticed you didn't mention the WICCIT, the World Conference on International Telecommunications which in my view was much more potentially nefarious and damaging to internet freedoms than either the SOPA or ACTA, that's one thing. And there wasn't such a public outcry against it, that's one aspect. The other is on ACTA. I don't think, I bet, now I stand to be corrected, but I bet 80% of the people who opposed ACTA didn't really understand what was in ACTA had never read it. I think the problem with ACTA was the lack of public consultation first and that's I think what really killed ACTA, not its content, not what it did. I don't really think it was, to be perfectly frank, a big internet defense issue. I think it was the lack of public consultation and then this notion that perhaps it had something to do with the internet. I think that was really why it failed. And I had another point, but I don't want to dominate the conversation, so I'll come back to it later. Okay, great, a couple of quick responses. I think you're right with the example of WICCIT. There wasn't a strong reaction among the internet community despite the efforts of internet nonprofits to kind of rally the troops again. And I think that's one of the challenges that the internet community faces is that it's hard to repeat what happened. It was such a mammoth grassroots movement that in a flash took people I think by surprise in a way. And how do you repeat that? The internet defense league is trying to repeat it, but the protests for the NSA surveillance had only disparaged it, but 2,000 people compared to thousands and millions that participated in the others. So that is definitely a challenge going forward, but that's something that there are definitely people who are trying to work to make sure that people stay involved. It's hard to do that. The second thing about ACTA, I think ACTA and both sets of protests are certainly open to interpretation on what was more important in terms of getting people to protest. It is true that the secrecy surrounding the negotiation of ACTA was a huge part of it. And I focused on the internet aspect of it, but I do think that the internet aspect of it was the one issue, even above it, beyond there was a generic drug issue, the intransit drugs issue that was also had a strong opposition among internet nonprofits or other nonprofit groups. I think the internet issue was the one that was most salient to, especially the people who marched in the streets, the people that I interviewed were, they understood this as a threat to their internet freedoms. And that's not to say that there weren't other issues or other issues as well, but the people that I talked to, this is the biggest concern that they had with ACTA. Yes, sir. What do you think it would take in order to mobilize this scale of protest toward abolishing the NSA? Yeah, that's a really, that's a tough question. And I've been puzzling over why the response to the NSA surveillance hasn't been nearly as strong. And I think one of my theories is that I think people have a harder time feeling the invasion of privacy from somebody, some sort of nebulous entity surveilling emails that are not publicly disclosed, that are not further disclosed. So to use an analogy, where people were strip-searched and if that were videotaped and put online, people can feel the invasion of privacy on both occurrences, both levels. With the NSA surveillance, it's this nebulous metaphysical kind of surveillance going out there and there was no disclosure of your emails into the public. So the concern, I think, or the feeling of invasion is not as, I think, palpable as it would be, for instance, in the case with SOPA when the internet activists and their opposition to SOPA were trying to make concrete what this would do, they were shutting down their own websites to sort of help people visualize our websites can be taken down. And I think people understood, at a very common sense level, how this might equal collateral damage. And I think that may be one part of the challenge with privacy is that it does not yet strike that same kind of fear. And I think people also, some people want to balance in the interests of national security and protecting against terrorist threats too, which is balancing the interests of privacy and security. Yes, sir. There may be a point to follow on. I think there's also the distinction between opposing something and the these being introduced to your point that the internet was a free space and this impinges and trying to think, what are the future laws that find the NSA or restricted and so on. And I want to link that to a question of what you see as the next step in the future. So I'm struck by what's going on in Brazil with the master civilians in that bill of rights when activists did succeed in translating concerns about how internet policy was going into a constructive agenda, but then have really struggled versus the idea of just batting away anything that tries to threaten the anarchy of the network. But you see the future as being one in which we have to build concrete governance bills of rights, sort of international regulation norm governance around the net, or in which we just go on and on, sort of just play on exactly the alternative. Yeah, I mean, I don't claim to have a predestined path that I see as the way that internet freedoms are protected. Certainly it can help, I think, if there are certain rights, core rights that are protected by law, specifically by positive law. And when you bring up the Brazil's example of the internet bill of rights there, I think that's an example of how protections might evolve internationally. So it doesn't have to be the United States, the one taking the lead in terms of protecting certain internet freedoms. It could be Brazil, it could be Poland. Another country that actually has opened up copyright reform discussion after there were serious protests in Poland over ACTA. So this is an international issue, like the internet is international, and I think we saw that activity and coordination internationally in SOPA, the SOPA-ACTA protests. So what end up happening, one path to sort of getting positive law to protect internet freedoms is it might be a developing country like Brazil, a fast developing country like Brazil, or Poland, or another country potentially elsewhere that protects internet freedoms. And then because they're trading partners with the United States, eventually one day maybe the United States has to agree to certain protections for internet freedoms in trade bills, in trade agreements. So that might be one path to have success on the offensive end. But I don't have any prediction on when that will occur, but it's certainly percolating through different countries right now. Yes. The model is, you're talking about here as kind of a bottom up individual activism driven, and I don't mean to diminish that. But I also note that as you pointed out, you've got Google, you've got Wikipedia, you've got entities with deeply vested reasons to not like SOPA and PIPA, who are big companies, big senders of the internet themselves. So I'm just wondering, another piece of the NSA story is that none of those have yet jumped out and blacked themselves out for that kind of a piece. So again, just your reflection on what is the role, vis-a-vis the bigger, more commercial entities in these kind of protests, and would that be a factor why we're not seeing it with the NSA? Well, to go back to the SOPA debate, the internet companies were certainly a big role in the debate. Google had been actively against the bill from the start. It was the only entity against SOPA that was invited to the House Judiciary Committee hearings on SOPA, which people thought was a little bit one-sided. And obviously when Google blacks out its logo, that's gonna make a big difference for the protest. So I'm not trying to minimize the role in which the tech companies played during the SOPA protest, but I think at the same time, you can't diminish the role that people played as well, because frankly speaking, Google did not get involved in terms of a protest until the very end. There was an earlier protest called American Censorship Day, and this is talked about in the Berkman Report, for those of you who read the Berkman Report. I also talk about it in my book. American Censorship Day occurred in November 2011, and Google was invited to participate and they didn't participate. They signed a letter against SOPA, but that was it. So they were kind of reluctant to do it. But to go to the second part of your question, the NSA part, Google, the chairman, Schmidt, Eric Schmidt came out yesterday sort of vocally against the NSA tapping into the part of the Google servers was in Hong Kong or wherever it was. It's not a blackout, but they're strongly trying to express their concern about the NSA surveillance. So I'm not sure if it's the lack of opposition from internet companies. I think they are opposed, and I think they were trying to work through political channels to get the administration and Congress to enact one of these bills before Congress to rein in the discretion of the NSA. But I think it's a larger issue in terms of to go back to the earlier question about the difference between privacy and censorship. I think the censorship issue was something that people felt more easily that what it could do versus privacy when there's kind of a ethereal notion of somebody surveilling your emails, but it's not disclosed, right? No, you can't find that you've lost your privacy to the email. I think that's probably why we haven't seen as, one of the reasons why we haven't seen as a dramatic response. I think your point is that some of the companies are less likely to speak up for the NSA surveillance because they've been complicit in their surveillance. And so I think, is that what you were trying to... That's a piece of it. Yeah, I just wanted to see whether, what is the degree to which the focus provided by Google makes a difference on the 19th. And why maybe missing in this case. We're certainly a big deal. Yes. I've been reading Thinking Fast and Slow, so just make color what I'm going to say. But reading this morning about loss and gain and how people look at loss and gain, we value loss twice as much as we've had in the game on average. We're more fearful to lose something than we are anxious to gain something. And what you said about internet freedom, it's the internet we were born with. Okay. It's the internet we grew up with and we were faced with a loss with soap and pepper and act up for whatever reasons. That's what the perception was. But if you look at the history of surveillance in the United States, you can go back and you can see documentation of Ma Belle saying, oh yeah, we've been monitoring phone calls for the federal government since the 1930s, right? At my advanced stage, I remember in the 60s and the 70s, we were saying, oh yeah, sure. They can keyword code your phone calls. They can capture the information when the keyword trips something. That's why you have to bounce from telephone booth to telephone booth, which don't exist anymore. So we sort of believe even now that we are being surveilled. And we know we're being surveilled. And it's going to take much more for us to try and gain back something that we've already perceived as lost. A secondary point of that is you look at what's happening with Rupert Murdoch and the trial that's going on in New York here right now. Something that I don't think has really come to the consciousness of people is that there's big brother, but sorry, Corey Dr. Rowe, there's little brother too, or corporate brother. And there are individuals who can do this as well. We know that. So the amplification that technology gives, both for good and ill, makes for some very shaky situations. But we haven't really collated all that information as clearly as we could collate it for SOPA, PIPA, and ACTIB. It's much more complex with NSA. It's much more complex with surveillance. We don't know. I read a story, and I'll finish with this. I read a story yesterday about a town in California which is now equipping its police officers with video monitors. So every time they go out on a call, they videotape what's happening in their interactions. And I was shocked to see that in the article, the ACLU doesn't see a problem with this as long as the tape is monitored and after a period of time is expunged. But every contact that you have with a policeman now is going to be taped and stored someplace. That's a little strange in a country that's supposed to be free. And they did that for evidentiary purposes? Yeah. The newspaper article was about a cop going out to a domestic call. Turns on the camera. The guy who answers the door is a little bit drunk, doesn't even notice what's going on. They're going to keep that videotape for evidence in case something happens later. How long later is? Who knows? Yeah, those are two excellent points. Just quick responses. I think that's right in terms of the loss of something feeling that more when people were born with a decentralized network of the internet. And that's why it helps to explain why people reacted so strongly to this notion that now the government would start ordering internet service providers to change the structure of the internet by cutting off domain names from their IP addresses. So I think that's right. The so-called breaking of the internet meme was a huge popular voice for the opposition. And I think that does explain why people were so animated from the start. And compared to privacy, you're right. In this country, we have surveillance for a while and FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was supposed to rail that in. After 9 and 11, the Patriot expanded the surveillance opportunities for NSA and NSA apparently took it and ran with it, right? Afterwards, and we haven't even scratched, I think, the surface of what's coming out in terms of what was going on. And that may sort of better explain why there isn't this visceral reaction among people to invasions of privacy. And you're right to point out that companies, I'll just use Facebook as an example, their privacy policies have always been criticized, right? And 1 billion people are on Facebook and are willing to, in some respect, sacrifice part of their privacy to be a part of this social network. So it is a really tricky issue. And that may help explain why there isn't this vocal response yet to NSA surveillance. Yes? I'm going to switch to the TPP because I think that the problem migrated from the actor to the TPP. Why isn't there the same kind of response? Or why the internet defenders, they have not achieved the results of the TPP? What is TPP? The trans-pacific partnership. The idea is similar to the act of trade agreement to ratchet up enforcement. So that's a very large response. I guess I would disagree a little bit that it is true there isn't yet the large popular response to negotiations over TPP. But I do think that NGOs, internet nonprofits, are much more galvanized now to follow these trade agreements that, by and large, are negotiated behind closed doors. So it's sort of hard to know what is actually going on unless there is a leaking of the text of the trade agreement, which is what happened in Acto. Acto was leaked onto WikiLeaks. And that's how people started hearing about what was being suggested during the negotiations for Acto. So I guess I think you're right to suggest that we haven't seen the level of popular response to TPP. But we have seen, I think, a more conservative effort among NGOs, nonprofit groups to make sure we follow the trade agreements and publicize what is being proposed. And I think that is a healthy thing. To go back to this whole sort of problem of can it ever be repeated again? That's, I think, a legitimate question. Can these responses ever be repeated again? Presumably, yes, in theory, yes. But can you actually galvanize people to get involved again? I think that's the hard question we face. Is that gentleman back there? Yeah, what you just mentioned is very much in line with what I'm a bit worried about. Soap and PIPA almost passed because Congress either didn't get sufficient input or input from the right people until people realized a little bit too late. And I'm just a bit worried about how do we make people aware when certain things will be taken from them? I just look at the extension of the Copyright Act a number of times, which they're already seeking input for the next generation of it, as yet another thing that would be taken from the public domain. And because the public domain is so dissipated, nobody's really speaking for it in those discussions. And how do we galvanize people to speak for something like that? Well, I think one thing to do is sign up on one of these listservs, the Internet Defense League, or EFF's listserv, Fight for the Future's listserv, Center for Democracy and Technology, et cetera. There are a bunch of internet nonprofits and nonprofits in other areas who follow these issues daily who are trying to stay on top of it. And I know it's difficult to stay on top of when we're also busy. But I think that's maybe step number one, is to try to keep informed about these various measures with copyright or with a trade agreement. And I have to say, though, one good byproduct of the SOPA debate was that the debate now over the reform of copyright law that's going on in the House has at least included more people into that debate. So they invited, for instance, Pam Samuelson of Berkeley, who is a more moderate voice in terms of copyright and balancing the copyright rights for the public. So I think that's sort of a good development to have more people at the table. You were right to characterize the debate of SOPA as not involving key players. And one thing that I haven't mentioned was that the internet engineers got involved into this debate. There were over 100 internet engineers who said the SOPA domain name blocking would jeopardize the DNS security protocol that was being developed by the funding of our own federal government. So it was like shooting ourselves on the foot by requiring this domain name blocking and sabotaging our efforts to make the internet more secure by having this DNS security protocol. So that was an important part of the debate that was never asked to be before Congress to testify. It was too late, basically. I mean, they were at the very end, but they didn't even hold a hearing because the protests overtook it. We should wish that our Congress should think naturally who are all the experts that need to come to testify about this legislation that could affect the internet. And they didn't really do that work for SOPA. And that's why it did. And well, maybe we should have negotiated more with Google. Well, Google actually did something because they went to Congress. But it wasn't negotiating with Google that needed to happen. And that's why I worry about the misconception. Yeah, Google actually supported part of SOPA. It's surprising. Google supported the follow-the-money approach of SOPA. So they were willing, and they may have done this for strategic reasons, thinking the bill would pass. So they needed to sound reasonable about something and not oppose everything. So they were willing to accept part of the bill. But then the popular movement overtook the debate. And it killed SOPA. Yes, sir? Yep. I wanted to push you on a technicality in your presentation. And I'm sorry that I have to do this. But at one point, you said that in the transition from SOPA to ACTA, that it was interesting in Europe because in Europe, people are serious about protests. They don't just protest online was what you said. And I'm worried about what that says about media activism, especially because I don't think that you are making that critique, that slactivist critique that many others make, certainly as you bring these other things up. But I worry that in mixing those things in your presentation that you're hurting a little bit of that goal of doing media activism that you see as being effective, especially when you come to this last point about why do we fight and what is actually effective against these political things, and that we need to be thinking all about all of these as strategies in an ecosystem that can be pushed on in different ways and different levers, especially in the case where I would say that in the US context, powers that be the government corporations don't respond well to street protests, where they might do so in Europe. And those look like different strategies that have different outcomes. And so I just wanted to push you on your point about what is serious protest. You can push me on that, that's totally fine. Mea Copa, I would say. It was tongue-in-cheek, basically. I was really quite impressed with the online protests in the United States. And in fact, I would admit, I was quite humbled by what people did, how effective they were, this fight for the future group that comes up with Free Beaver Campaign. They also did the American censorship day. They helped organize that. It was incredibly successful. And it was mostly online, I would have to say. So I don't want to belittle the online protests and the impact that they can have to help galvanize the masses, so to speak, to help protest the bill. But when you compare it to European Union, sort of the European Union had this own kind of tradition of protests, and it was like, wow, that happened in the European Union in the middle winter. It's also awe-inspiring and kind of humbling. It's like, wow, how did that happen? And it was facilitated just as what happened in the Arab Spring, the protest against Akta was facilitated by Facebook. People organized their protests on Facebook event pages and that was it. And then people did it in every single city and internet nonprofits cataloged the Facebook event pages so you could find your protest. And there's... So in any event, yeah, your qualification is well taken. Yes? What's the follow-up on that one? What's the follow-up on that one? Why we have to melt the phone lines then? You said it was the power of the human voice, something physical about the protest that was important that somehow in the minds of the congressperson, is Congresswoman who said that? Congress, yes. You're right, it wasn't enough to just have it be digital. It had to go in human voice to make them really see it. Yeah, in her view, it was the surest way to get the attention of your member of Congress because that's the way that the members of Congress interpret sort of the opposition based on the strength, yeah, analog, essentially, that if people have bothered to call me and are calling off the hook, uh-oh, versus emails piling up, some of the emails aren't even read, right? They're only read from people from the district at times by certain members of Congress. So there's no guarantee your email will actually be read, but a phone call, they're gonna actually answer with a receptionist at the member of Congress office, so. And there are actually novel digital tools that are built to allow people to dial from their computers and call. And those were created by folks like a tumbler and a couple of the other activists efforts. So this is actually a digital approach, but it ended up using that analog response mechanism that they understand at the Hill. I think one of the reasons they understand that at the Hill is that they have actually software, ironically, for tracking phone calls, like the number of phone calls, the level of arraigness of the person and the subject matter. And so that's a report that goes, and I don't know if they do that for email or not. They track the level of arraigness? Yeah. The legislative assistant question. Yeah, like how passionate is the person? Every call is tracked. Legislative assistant once told me that you have a certain level for form letters. You have a certain level for so many votes, right? So one phone call equals 100 people. One letter equals 10 people. A form letter equals three people. A handwritten letter equals 25. So there's a whole hierarchy that they've developed with all of this in terms of constituent services and all of that. How impactful they are. Yeah, yeah. Great. Are there questions? I had another question if I may about the Bill of Rights, which a couple of people have mentioned now. I mean, in theory, we shouldn't have to have a special internet Bill of Rights. In theory, charters of human rights that exist, your American Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration should, in principle, cover all the rights that we need, which should then be translated as well to the internet. It's just another form of communication, isn't it? Yeah, that's just... There are the specific identifiable limitations or requirements on the internet that need a special, sweet, generous Bill of Rights. Yeah, that's certainly one view that all of this can be incorporated into our First Amendment of the United States or other countries' recognition or the principles of freedom of expression. You know, the hard part is that when you get in these copyright debates, how the freedom of speech caches out is contested. So I don't know if people who studied copyright law realize under our Supreme Court jurisprudence, Eldred and Golan, the decisions basically say that for most copyright laws, there's no First Amendment scrutiny at all because we have fair use and idea expression dichotomies to act as First Amendment safeguards. That's the neat kind of way that Supreme Court has tried to handle some of the challenges to copyright laws. So in the SOPA debate, it's not automatically clear that under the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court in interpreting the First Amendment, that we would have the same result as Harvard's Lawrence Tribe said that there was a First Amendment violation. It was, you know, there was no guarantee. But in my view, what was interesting was that the popular debate really wasn't about these legalistic arguments and parsing of Supreme Court cases. It was just we were born with the internet, we understand freedom of the internet and this is a threat to our internet freedoms. And that is consistent with this notion of popular constitutionalism where people develop their own understandings of individual freedoms and try to fight for them. And we believe some of them are codified in the Bill of Rights, but some of them may be not necessarily equivalent to traditional understandings of individual rights. So it may take the involvement of the people in arguing for something that eventually percolates up and one theory is eventually the Supreme Court might adopt that popular view after it's had time to germinate in different disputes. So I mean, I think that's the interaction between people and courts that might take place in terms of fights for internet freedoms. One more, yeah. Anybody else? One more question. So does the same rationale that applies like the explanation on why the individuals didn't get together to fight against the NSA applies also to the corporations like Google or Wikipedia? Why didn't they join? Oh, why didn't they join themselves? Yeah, why didn't they do something? Like they took the NSA, right? They're for the social, but why didn't they take the lead? Well, I think Facebook, Google, I think they've come out with at least strongly worded criticisms of what NSA is doing. And I think we haven't seen the last of what the internet companies will do. In part, it's self-interest, economic. Because if their users fear that what Google is doing or what Facebook is doing is handing over our information without adequate legal standards being met, then that'll hurt their business. So I think in part they have an economic interest in making sure that they do have a certain level of safeguards and due process built in when it turns out the NSA is seeking information from them. And some of the information the NSA was taking was without their permission. It was just like going in and raiding. Apparently, that was one of the recent disclosures. But some of it is with their permission. And I think they've come out pretty strongly against some of the things that were happening. But I don't think we've seen the end of what the debate will lead to in the NSA over the NSA surveillance. Whether they are more aggressive and take a stand against it, I'm not sure. Corporations are ambivalent about it because a lot of people are criticizing them for surveilling and seeing their own users and some of their own policies, like real name policy at Google and Facebook implement. So I think part of it is just ambivalence on their end of how do you talk about this without also criticizing yourself? Yeah, and we heard some of that kind of concern in the earlier comments or questions. Facebook is Facebook using your personal information for monetary benefit, et cetera. So I think you're right, there may be ambivalence, but once it becomes a huge public issue, I think, and I think it already has, I think it does become something in the economic interest of these companies to make sure that they at least appear to be on the side of people, in protecting their users' information versus allowing carte blanche authority to the NSA to just come in and take everything. Okay, any other questions? Okay, well, I think that's it then. Well, thank you so much for these questions and comments. I really appreciate it. Thank you.