For much of past year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has fought a one-man battle to keep the Senate versions of the aggressive online-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA from moving through on a unanimous vote. Last week, as a major online mobilization loomed against the legislation, I spoke with Wyden about why he opposes the bills, where the process stands and his alternative. A lightly edited transcript follows:
The Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act are well known at this point, but your involvement began earlier, with the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).
The COICA bill, which was the predecessor in the Senate to the Protect IP Act, came out in September. It was by Chairman Pat Leahy, just as Protect IP is. We’re up against one of the most powerful, savvy and active of the traditional Washington lobbies. Their bill has cleared the committee unanimously twice. We said from the beginning there’s a lot on the Senate calender, these are complicated issues, and when this is front-and-center, there will be a tidal wave of opposition. And we’ve been proven right.
And how did you slow the bill?
I put a public hold on it. And I said from the beginning that first, there’s a problem here. There’s no question that people who sell fake Rolexes or tainted Viagra or movies they don’t own are bad actors. Second, there’s a straightforward solution, which is to cut off the money that gets people into piracy. But third, to solve this problem by doing damage to the Internet — which has been a juggernaut for job growth and innovation and free speech — is a mistake. So that was our argument: There’s a problem, there’s a remedy, but you don’t need a cluster bomb to solve it.
What makes PIPA and SOPA cluster bombs?
PIPA and SOPA, at their heart, are censorship bills and blacklisting bills, and they undermine much of the architecture of the Internet. I recognize that you don’t have discussions about the domain name system at every coffee shop in America. But it’s essentially the directory to the net. If you didn’t have a universal naming system — for my Senate site, wyden.senate.gov — it would just be gibberish. What the bills do is say, when you get a court order, you can’t use the domain-name system to resolve to the IP address.
Let’s say I run EzraTube.com. And someone has uploaded copyrighted content to my site. What happens?
When you type EzraTube.com into your browser, your browser is asking Comcast to ask other servers where that goes. These servers basically act as phonebooks. What the so-called “DNS remedy” in the bill does is enable the attorney general to get a court order that tells Comcast, ‘When people want to find EzraTube.com, don’t send them there. Send them to a Department of Justice site instead.’ People who want to work around this would be able to. There are already third-party tools that use foreign servers or other domain-name servers outside of Comcast’s network. That’s a problem because, for the last 15 years, we’ve spent all this time building the DNS system into a secure standard. All of the important work on the net is built around the DNS system.
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