Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet Read Online Free PDF

condemned sites. Users who streamed a minimal amount of licensed content without permission, including through YouTube, would face felony charges. And most of the new powers made use of short-cut legal procedures that strained the limits of due process.
Gabriel Levitt
    It made sense for SOPA supporters to sell the bill as one protecting the public health. In fact, SOPA lobbyists regularly invoked Section 105 to convince members of Congress to support the bill as a matter of protecting seniors who order medication online. It also gave members of Congress great political cover to support the bill, despite not really understanding it.
Patrick Ruffini
    Approached from the outside, if the issue could be framed as an issue of government overreach, rank-and-file Republicans, many of them Tea Party freshmen, could be rallied to oppose the bills as a sort of default anti-government, anti-Obama Administration position. Shortly after the new Congress convened, we made a point of going to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference with flyers talking up the dangers of giving Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s Justice Department broad discretionary power to take down websites.
Ernesto Falcon
    On September 20, 2011, after a full year of fighting in the Senate against the Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act (COICA) and its follow up bill, PIPA, I figured we were going to lose the fight on Capitol Hill unless a massive public outcry woke up Congress. At this point, more than one-third of the Senate cosponsored PIPA and responses to our concerns on free speech, overly broadband government authority over the Internet’s architecture, cybersecurity, and additional lawsuits killing innovative startups were virtually unheeded by most.
Gabriel Levitt
    Price controls in other countries mean that drug prices are much lower abroad. Before the Internet, the only way for Americans to take advantage of lower prescription drug prices in other countries was to travel, usually in the form of trips to Canada and Mexico. In fact, in the beginning of the last decade members of Congress would lead bus trips up to Canada to help their constituents afford needed medication. Now the Internet has created a marketplace in which Americans who struggle to afford prescription medication in the U.S. can access lower-priced foreign pharmacies. Since lower drug prices correlate with more Americans filling their prescriptions, the online marketplace in pharmaceuticals benefits the public health, but U.S. laws serve the economic interests of producers at the expense of consumers. That’s because federal law bans individuals from importing the same medicine sold in U. S. pharmacies from Canada and other countries where it’s much more affordable.
Patrick Ruffini
    Only Silicon Valley Democrat Zoe Lofgren could be counted on as a firm ally in early 2011, raising questions that February about the Department of Homeland Security’s takedown program for domestic websites, and the fact that eighty-four thousand run-of-the-mill websites were shut off for three days as part of a misdirected order against a domain hosting company. The incident also made for an instructive horror story about the lack of due process involved: the government had only meant to target one site, but in the process, had plastered a notice on tens of thousands of sites effectively accusing their owners of child pornography.
Zoe Lofgren
    The effort to pass the SOPA/PIPA legislation tracked prior road maps used by what my friend Senator Wyden lightheartedly dubbed “Big Content.” Their game plan was to create momentum by lining up both business and labor allies, and support from both Republicans and Democrats. The costs of infringement were emphasized and sometimes exaggerated while the costs of crippling technological innovation were ignored. There was an almost complete unwillingness to solicit savvy technological input. So it came as no surprise when the first hearing on