Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by and David Moon Patrick Ruffini David Segal

really bad idea politically to move forward.The Internet Blackout made it crystal clear to all in Congress that a vote for one of these bills would be political suicide.
Zoe Lofgren
    By January 23rd, the bills were officially killed when Chairman Lamar Smith announced the indefinite delay of the SOPA markup and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) pulled PIPA from the agenda in the Senate.
Aaron Swartz
    We killed the bill dead. So dead that when members of Congress propose something that even touches the Internet, they give a long speech beforehand about how it is definitely not at all like SOPA. So dead that when you ask Congressional staffers about it, they groan and shake their heads, like it’s all a bad dream they’re trying hard to forget. So dead, that it’s hard to believe this story.
8. “We Killed the Bill Dead”
Casey Rae-Hunter (co-founder of The Future of Music coalition)
    In the post-SOPA spin cycle, some in the media were keen to paint this as a pitched battle between big content and big tech. The corporate entertainment industry was happy to play along, painting a conspiratorial picture of the protests. This was far from the case. First, the entertainment industry had quite a head start in terms of lobbying, having already poured millions of dollars into Washington before most of the tech companies even showed up. Second, the opposition to SOPA (and to a lesser extent, PIPA) was diverse, diffuse, and powered from the bottom-up.
Aaron Swartz
    Hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing. Hard to remember how it could have been any other way.
Patrick Ruffini
    First, SOPA and PIPA’s opponents were united. The fact that all the technical experts and engineers who weighed in opposed the bills was weighed heavily. Second, we marshaled detailed arguments. Using that technical background to our advantage, we were able to present a detailed case for why SOPA and PIPA broke the Internet, laying out networking and cyber security concerns that were not initially obvious. Opponents were more communicative and open—something also seen in the media—and proponents more circumspect and reluctant. Finally, we knew who our targets were.
Lawrence Lessig (director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University)
    Congressmen will always be dependent upon their funders. That’s human nature. But we can change who their funders are. Rather than a tiny fraction of the 1%, we could create a system in which we all are the effective funders of politicalcampaigns—whether a system of public funding, like most other mature democracies, or a system of “citizen funding,” where all citizens, but only citizens, contribute to the funding of campaigns. Imagine, for example, that every citizen had a $50 democracy voucher that she could give to any candidate who agreed to fund his or her campaign with vouchers plus contributions limited to $100. That system would produce an economy of influence radically different from the one we have today.
Casey Rae-Hunter
    In many ways, the goal of intellectual property enforcement could be made easier by taking a hard look at how music and other creative content is licensed. What we want are more legal services that compensate artists and where fans can find the music they love. This will require figuring out how to more quickly and efficiently get large catalogs of music from service to user.
Erin McKeown (musician)
    One of the main victories of the fight against SOPA/PIPA was the realization by many artists that they are also copyright holders, and that the Internet offers them an opportunity to exercise these rights however they choose. The work around SOPA/PIPA showed the world that copyright holders are not necessarily large media companies. Instead, copyright holders are a diverse group that will not all make the same decisions on how to manage their rights. Many artists understood, perhaps for the first time, that being a copyright holder doesn’t mean