Congress Will Take Up ‘Son of SOPA,’ Sohn Says
LAS VEGAS -- Work on a revised version of the Stop Online Piracy Act will continue, after the fight over the legislation emerged briefly as a top battle in Congress last year, said Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn during a Tuesday panel discussion at the Consumer Electronics Show. “Absolutely we will see the ‘Son of SOPA’ and the more controversial provisions of SOPA will all be stripped,” Sohn said. “A lot of us … will be told that we're unreasonable for opposing this new very reasonable bill. So expect it to happen. It’s already in the works."
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Debate over SOPA provides the opportunity to look at copyright reform, Sohn said. “I think everything is on the table, including copyright terms, and make the other side explain why we shouldn’t bring balance back to copyright,” she said. “Let’s point to those that want greater and stronger and longer copyright enforcement and put it to them, ‘Why shouldn’t we have some balance. Why shouldn’t we turn the clock back to the original purpose of copyright.’ I think this is the year that we push our own affirmative agenda. Make the other side go on the defensive.” Copyright terms, fair use reform, statutory damages reform and issues such as anti-circumvention provisions are all on the table, Sohn said. “And another big one is somebody has to got to reform trade policy and the U.S. Trade Representative because they're completely off the rails wanting intellectual property provisions in trade agreements."
John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and onetime lyricist for the Grateful Dead, said artistic works deserve special protection. “There is a big difference between a song and a toaster, and treating songs as though they were no different from toasters is absolutely not the right way to monetize human creativity,” he said. Hank Shocklee of Shocklee Entertainment said he opposes Congress passing a revised version of SOPA. Shocklee was a founder of the Bomb Squad, an American hip-hop production team. “I don’t want to see anything happen,” he said. “I think we have laws to remedy any kind of infringement. You can sue somebody and take them to court and that to me is sufficient. I think that anything else is overreaching. … We're trying to basically stop things before they even happen.” Many of the questions relate to freedom of speech issues, Shocklee said. “We're starting to see video being pulled down from YouTube because of copyright infringements, because someone’s voice is being used,” he said. “You know who has the legal claims to somebody’s voice or not?"
The time is ripe to examine existing copyright law and make the fixes that are needed, said Mike Masnick, CEO of Techdirt. “There are a ton of problems out there thanks to existing copyright law and they all really should be on the table to be fixed,” Masnick said. “There are all of these things that we were told were going to be the problems that came out of SOPA and yet they're already happening. … It’s really important to take the momentum of what did happen with SOPA and try to do whatever we can to use that to push back on all of the different problems.”