[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 6 (Wednesday, January 18, 2012)]
[House]
[Pages H33-H34]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1020
                           STOP PIPA AND SOPA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. PIPA, Protect Intellectual Property Act; SOPA, Stop 
Online Piracy Act. Now, who could be against bills like that, to 
prevent the theft of intellectual property or online piracy, to prevent 
online piracy. Clever names, great. Content, not so much.
  Now, the worst, organized, government-sanctioned theft of 
intellectual property in the world goes on day in and day out in 
Communist China. And this government has done precious little to rein 
that in. We run a huge trade deficit with China. We're buying their 
goods. They are dependent upon our purchasing of their goods. And yet 
we allow them to get away with that. This bill does nothing to deal 
with the organized theft in Communist China, which is the greatest 
problem that confronts us in the theft of intellectual property.
  Now, concealed behind these really benign names and embedded in the 
text is something that's kind of like what we call malware. Now, we all 
know what malware can do to our computers. We've seen it; the black 
screen of death. Well, this is a little bigger than malware that gets 
on your computer, steals your data, or crashes your computer. It could 
crash the entire Internet and the productivity of the Internet.
  Now, eventually this legislation could threaten the existence of an 
entire domain because of one blog entry, one user link. A whole domain 
could be taken down. Wow. That's pretty incredible. Imagine how some of 
these user-content sites are going to have to try and police things.
  Well, they can always err on the side of censorship because there are 
broad provisions in this bill to allow you in good faith to censor 
something because you thought maybe it was a problem. So they could 
start censoring rather dramatically. The legislation also includes very 
broad language for so-called anti-circumvention, that is any site that 
provides information that could--could, maybe, possibly--help users get 
around censorship would be a target. Well, that's kind of an 
interesting contradiction for the government of the United States 
because actually we promote through the State Department software that 
helps democratic activists in Communist China, which I already 
mentioned, and in Iran and other vicious dictatorships around the world 
to get around their government's online censorship. We're now going to 
enshrine principles that would allow this sort of censorship, sort of 
mimicking some of the actions of the Iranian and the Communist Chinese, 
I guess, in regards to the Internet here. Of course, we're going to 
allow private companies to impose this censorship instead of the 
government imposing this censorship; but they would have government 
enforcement behind their actions, the private right of actions that 
would be allowed in this bill.
  This is pretty extraordinary legislation, very poorly drafted. If you 
didn't care about the Internet, if it didn't exist and you wanted to 
put in the toughest possible protections theoretically for piracy and 
intellectual property, maybe you'd write something like

[[Page H34]]

this. But there's a better way to go than to kill the Internet at the 
same time as you're trying to get at these few bad actors that are out 
there, let alone the state bad actors, like China.
  I'd love to see a bill drafted to take on the Chinese on their multi-
billion-dollar annual theft of intellectual property from the United 
States. Everybody says we can't take on China; no, they're too big. So 
instead, we'll go after small, creative people who could tread across 
this line unknowingly who are participating in a much larger site. They 
have their blog as part of that site or they have their post as part of 
that site. The whole site could be taken down.
  This legislation, I'm pleased to say, that it seems like the White 
House has woken up to the dangers here; the fact that we are 
essentially creating the PATRIOT Act national security letter 
provisions for private companies to censor the Internet. We cannot let 
that happen. We must stop this legislation. We also need to take on 
meaningfully piracy and the theft of intellectual property.

                          ____________________