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 Page B

of battles over the breadth of copyright law; Josh Levy from Free Press links the SOPA/ PIPA effort to the fight for Net Neutrality (arguably the most well-known prior Internet policy battle); and technology blogger Mike Masnick of Techdirt provides a primer on the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which eventually morphed into SOPA and PIPA .

    Many opponents to SOPA/PIPA identify primarily as intellectual property reform activists. This sign, from a New York City tech community protest on January 18, 2012, makes the point using fairly blunt language. http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/photos/5468462/87002632/

FOR ME, IT ALL STARTED WITH A PHONE CALL
AARON SWARTZ
    Aaron Swartz was a writer, a technologist, and an Internet freedom and social justice activist. The essay below is adapted from a talk Aaron gave in conjunction with the software consulting firm ThoughtWorks, where he worked for most of 2012 .
    For me, it all started with a phone call.
    It was way back in September 2010, when I got a phone call from my friend Peter.
    “Aaron,” he said. “There’s an amazing bill you have to take a look at.”
    “What is it?” I said.
    “It’s called COICA. The Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act.”
    “Oh, Peter,” I said. “I don’t care about copyright law. Maybe you’re right, maybe Hollywood is right, but either way is it really such a big deal? I’m not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Health care. Financial reform. Those are the sorts of issues I work on. Not something obscure like copyright.”
    I could hear Peter grumbling. “Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. But it doesn’t matter for right now. Because this isn’t a bill about copyright.”
    “It’s not?”
    “No, it’s a bill about freedom of speech.” Now I was listening.
    Peter explained what all of you have probably long since learned. That this bill would let the government devise a list of websites that Americans weren’t allowed to visit. Over the next day, I came up with lots of ways to try to explain this to people. I said it was a Great Firewall of America. I said it was an Internet blacklist. I said it was online censorship. But I think it’s worth taking a step back, putting aside the rhetoric, and thinking about just how radical this bill really was.
    Yes, there are lots of times where the government makes rules about speech. If you slander a private figure. If you buy a television ad that lies to people. If your wild party plays booming music all night. In all these cases, the government can stop you.
    But this was something radically different. It wasn’t that the government went to people and asked them to take down particular material that was illegal. It shut down whole websites. Essentially, it stopped Americans from communicating entirely with certain other groups.
    There’s nothing really like it in U.S. law. If you play loud music all night, the government doesn’t slap you with an order requiring you play mute for the next couple weeks. They don’t say nobody can make any more noise inside your house. There’s a specific complaint, which they ask you to specifically remedy, and then your life goes on.
    The closest I can find is a case where the government was at war with an adult book store. The place kept selling porn, the government kept getting it declared illegal, and then, frustrated, they decided to shut the whole bookstore down. But even that was declared unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment.
    You might say: surely COICA would get declared unconstitutional too!
    But I knew that if the Supreme Court had one blind spot around the First Amendment, more than anything else—more than slander or libel; more than pornography; more, even, than child pornography—it was copyright. When it came to copyright it was like the part of the justices’ brains shut off and they totally forgot about the First Amendment. You got the sense