Bootleggers & Baptists: How Economic Forces and Moral Persuasion Interact to Shape Regulatory Politics Read Online Free PDF

obligating search engines and certain other domestic websites to refrain from linking them. Eliminating piracy has a nice Baptist ring to it: at least that is what the Bootleggers thought when they built their argument.
    Though it was not framed in this way, SOPA can be thought of as a concealed subsidy to copyright owners. Typically, copyright claims are enforced through civil litigation by the holder of the copyright at its own expense. Many online “file lockers” have indeed been sued by content companies; yet often it was the alleged “pirate sites” that proved victorious in court, because website operators are generally not liable for infringing files uploaded by their users unless the operators actively encourage illegal conduct. The blocking process that SOPA would have established was, in essence, a mechanism for offloading the costs of enforcing content-industry copyrights onto technology companies and taxpayers.
    As might be expected, many major U.S. tech companies are not enthusiastic about being drafted into the role of copyright police, and given the government’s spotty record of accurately identifying “pirate” sites, tech investors feared that startups enabling users to upload content could too easily be cut off from U.S. users—a potential death sentence for a fledgling firm (Morath and Fowler 2012). These groups lobbied against the proposed legislation as vigorously as the content industries had lobbied for it.
    Baptist arguments were to be found on both sides. Supporters of the law condemned overseas file lockers for enriching themselves at the expense of American artists, and content-industry workers and warned that unchecked piracy would impoverish public culture by making the production of new creative works less economically viable. In addition to raising a variety of technical objections, opponents blasted the law’s domain-blocking provisions as a form of censorship without due process and argued that it would symbolically undermine the global push for Internet freedom, emboldening repressive regimes to claim that even the liberty-loving United States did not adhere to its own rhetoric of openness.
    While the pro-SOPA arguments were primarily advanced by the studios and labels themselves, covertly attempting to disguise their economic interests as a social benefit, opposition to the law was publicly spearheaded by an array of well-established civil liberties and human rights groups—real Baptists. These included the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters without Borders, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the American Library Association (Kang 2011).
    Internet users preferred the real Baptists to the fake ones. On January 18, 2012, constituents flooded congressional switchboards in such overwhelming numbers that by the end of the day, many of the law’s own cosponsors declared they had seen the light and joined the ranks of the opposition (Kane 2012). Although many factors shaped the public’s response—not least the objective merits of the arguments on each side—it seems plausible that many were predisposed to give greater credence to moral arguments delivered by Baptist groups whose perceived raison d’être was principle rather than profit.
    Noncooperative Strategy
    Moralized calls for political action may be initiated by Bootleggers deploying Baptist rhetoric, as seen in the case of SOPA and other proposals to crack down on copyright piracy. But often the shifting sands of economic interests bring Bootleggers in as latecomers to long-standing moral crusades, thereby providing Baptists with the decisive boost they need to achieve their aims. Economist Howard Marvel (1977) tells one such story in his account of the implementation of England’s Factory Act of 1833, then known as Althorp’s Factory Act. Marvel’s analysis notes that the law was hailed as a humanitarian move that placed burgeoning textile mill