As a former legislator, I see a committee vote as a key choke point—and typically a point of no return: if a bill makes it through committee it typically means that it has the backing of legislative leadership and that it’s greased and ready to go before the full floor for a final vote, where, for having leadership’s backing, it’s pretty certain to pass. Floor votes are theater. If it fails to make it through committee after an earnest push, it’s likely not going anywhere anytime soon.
To most of the public, a mid-December committee vote is but a form of legislative arcana that’s much less interesting than getting blissful on egg nog. It’s much easier to rally people to take action in front of a floor vote, even though the outcome of such votes is almost always pre-ordained and quite unlikely to be influenced by public pressure.
There was a standing sense that we needed to pull together another meeting of Internet and activist big wigs to try to mobilize more people for the next round of the fight, whenever that might be. I worked hard to convince as many people as possible that it was RIGHT NOW, before the scheduled “markup” of SOPA in the House Judiciary Committee.
A core group of us—Holmes and Tiffiniy at FFTF, Elizabeth Stark, Brad Burnham, and Aaron and I—began to organize in New York. (The Silicon Alley folks, for whatever reasons, got mobilized in opposition to SOPA far faster than the West Coast.)
Brad leaned on his portfolio companies to participate, and with that came a scatter shot of some of the moment’s most influential social media startups, and a home base for the meeting: Tumblr’s hipster-chic offices in lower Manhattan.
We asked Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren to open the call, and she quickly accepted: her gravitas would help draw people in, and she would be able to walk us through the nuts-and-bolts of the markup process. And the techies whom we were hoping would participate would be impressed by her savvy about issues that many of them seemed to assume every last member of Congress was completely ignorant of. (A handful of them actually know a thing or two, and several others are at least aware, and willing to admit, that they don’t know much.)
Millions of people had already joined forces to fight SOPA and PIPA—but that work had overwhelmingly taken part in the virtual space. For me a “meeting” used to mean a face-to-face encounter around a bulky wooded table at the State House or City Hall; now it meant any of dozens of conference calls that took place two or three times a day with people whom I’d never met in real life.
Part of me longed for more real, in-person negotiation and collaboration, and the Tumblr meeting served that purpose and has remained an important marker when I look back on organizing efforts of last fall and winter. Nearly one hundred people participated, about half of them in person and half on the phones, from throughout the country. Participants ranged from reddit and Tumblr employees to progressive MoveOn organizers to libertarian wonks at Cato, and the meeting provided me with the sense that this was coalescing into a real movement. We were now a team that actually identified as such, with a clear, unified purpose at hand. The mood was upbeat, with a newfound sense that we could win this fight, and the Holiday spirit was in the air: reddit’s Alexis Ohanian showed up in costume, just back from a flashmob of Santas.
Lofgren implored us to turn up the volume of emails and phone calls—the notion that we should “melt the phones” on Capitol Hill was ubiquitous, but I can’t recall whether or not she uttered that precise phrase. We immediately started brainstorming new sites and tools that we could use to make that happen. Demand Progress and Fight for the Future (who generally had access to a more robust tech team than we did) launched a refresh of several sites and conspired on activism tools, the most novel of which (FFTF’s brainstorm) allowed users to “self-censor” posts to Facebook. Their friends would need to email Congress in opposition to SOPA in order to read the text beneath the redaction.
These screenshots show examples of Fight for the Future’s self-censorship tools in use.
At this point we’d been posting updates about COICA, PIPA, and SOPA to the websites FireDogLake and DailyKos for well over a year as part of my attempt to rally the Left in opposition; we did the same now, with the sense that people were finally attuned to the cause, and invested in winning it. Here’s one version of an exhilarated summary of the Tumblr meeting we posted to such sites and several listservs that weekend, which outlines the game plan we’d concocted to support our allies like Lofgren as they carried our water through the markup.
ACTION NEEDED THIS WEEK: JOIN THE FIGHT AGAINST THE STOP ONLINE PIRACY ACT (SEE BELOW)–PLEASE FORWARD THIS, POST TO LISTS, BLOGS, ETC.
This Saturday, more than seventy representatives from leading tech companies and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum participated in a meeting to coordinate action against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The meeting, which included leaders from Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and reddit was remarkable for the array of participating organizations and its focus on how to mobilize to inspire millions of Americans to take action to tell Congress that this bill is deeply flawed.
Representative Zoe Lofgren opened the meeting with an overview of the current state of the legislation, emphasizing the need for Americans to call their representatives EARLY THIS WEEK to voice their strong discontent with the bill: It is slated for a vote in the House Judiciary Committee on THURSDAY.
Please read the below to find out how you can get involved. If we’re going to beat SOPA—and future bills like it—we must expand the network of involvement fast …
Action Plan: 12/15 House Judiciary SOPA Markup
The most important thing to know:
We have the best chance of making a difference on this bill if we can push hundreds of thousands of calls into the House of Representatives Monday through Thursday. This is because it’s crucial our voices are heard BEFORE the bill enters the markup (voting) stage in the House Judiciary committee.
Here’s what you can do:
1) Use whatever means necessary to drive users to our central portal—FightForTheFuture.org—where people will be prompted to call their House representative and given the tools to know what to say and how to say it.
2) Spread our censorship tools—please visit AmericanCensorship.org to find a tool that lets anyone redact portions of a tweet, Facebook post, blog post, etc. The redaction will be a link back to the AmericanCensorship. org page to drive calls.
3) Drive people to IWorkforTheInternet.org to post pictures of themselves to tell the world that the Internet is an engine of jobs growth in this country.
4) Develop your own tools to drive calls to the U.S. House of Representatives (calls to the Senate are not a priority this week)—please let us know if you need any assistance with scripts or other materials to support these tools.
5) Forward this email to anybody and everybody who is in a position to help (sites that might participate, activist orgs, reporters and bloggers, etc)
FACT SHEET ABOUT THE LEGISLATION (SOPA)
SOPA’s provisions would directly:
1) Undermine the DMCA safe harbor by forcing sites to start policing usergenerated content BEFORE it gets uploaded, or risk being shut down for facilitating infringement.
2) Give the government new powers to block Americans’ access to domains that are accused of facilitating copyright infringement.
3) Ban others from linking back to said sites, and ban search engines from listing them in the indexes.
4) Make it a felony for people to upload unlicensed content, punishable by five years in prison. (Think background music, cover bands, karaoke vids, etc.)
The consequences we predict are that SOPA will:
1) Kill existing and prospective jobs; 2) Stifle innovation; 3) Undermine web security—more on that in this letter from Sandia National Lab; 4) Allow our government to engage in new forms of censorship; 5) Give comfort (and know-how) to regimes abroad that are seeking to use censorship to stymie democracy and political unrest.
Thanks so much for taking on this fight—we can absolutely still win if we keep working together and mobilize our membership and user bases like never before. It’ll go down in history, and leave a lasting infrastructure that we can use to fight back against future attacks on the web. If you want some quick inspiration and a sense of how far we’ve come, check out this great Slate piece on the rise of the “Geek Lobby.”
The markup (described below in more detail by Patrick Ruffini) probably was indeed the point of no return for the bill—despite the tremendous happenings that were yet to come. We had a singular mission throughout: to keep bombarding Congress with calls and emails until the markup ended, driven by email alerts to the Demand Progress and Fight for the Future email lists, each now on the order of seven hundred fifty thousand people strong, whom we steered to the American Censorship landing page. Several sites that had participated in the meeting at Tumblr, and many others, urged their users to participate too. We expected the effort to be a one-day endeavor, but as Patrick explains, it became much more complicated than that as Lamar Smith dropped his reins and utterly lost control of his committee—Republicans and Democrats alike.
That just doesn’t happen: chairs simply don’t try this hard to move bills out of their own committees, advance them to votes in front of audiences of hundreds of thousands—with an unheard-of more than one hundred thousand people said to have been watching the live stream, and myriad others anxiously awaiting the results—and have the whole endeavor melt down before them, leaving them only to stand aside, consider the wreckage, and wallow in alternating despair and denial. Not only did the poor stooge not know that his cause was toast—he was deluded enough to publicly insist that he would bring the bill back before the committee when the House next reconvened, ostensibly to somehow achieve a vote tally in its favor.
It was a shocking, public rebuke for Smith, of the sort that someone of his stature seldom suffers—and we heard through the grapevine that John Boehner and Eric Cantor agreed about the severity of the embarrassment, and that they wanted the Whole Damned Thing shut down.
The growing consternation put other politicians in compromising positions, and they took notice of the striking doings before the House Judiciary Committee. California Senator Dianne Feinstein went home for the holidays with the (perhaps naive) hope of brokering a ceasefire in the civil war that was brewing between her state’s North (Silicon Valley) and South (Hollywood). Tech titans expressed that they were more than happy to meet—any indication that their concerns were being taken seriously representing clear evidence that their standing was improving. However, when she sought the presence of Hollywood, via a communiqué to Disney President Bob Iger, he made it clear that he and his associates sure weren’t going to waste their time meeting with that measly senior senator from the nation’s most populous state: they’d done more than enough talking already, and had their votes sewn up.
It’s important to remember not to stare directly at the sparks that fly when egos this large collide. But even were their stances equally righteous, it’d be hard not to preference the will of an elected official who’s third only to the president and vice president in the size of her constituency, rather than an over-paid peddler of Hollywood schlock—who’s overseen the ruination of the Muppets franchise, and now holds Star Wars in his clutches.
Feinstein would shift from oblivious supporter of PIPA to ambivalent, to moderately opposed, and eventually asked Harry Reid to postpone action on the legislation. We made sure that legislative staff was put on notice, as the Huffington Post reported.
In December, HuffPost reported that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a Protect IP co-sponsor with deep ties to both Hollywood and the technology industry, thought disputes between two of her most prominent corporate constituencies had been worked out. After that story ran, Feinstein attempted to broker a compromise, calling both tech companies and film studios.
“Walt Disney Co. President and CEO Bob Iger declined the invitation on behalf of content providers. ‘Hollywood did not feel that a meeting with Silicon Valley would be productive at this time,’ said a spokesperson. The meeting took place with only tech companies present. Feinstein, once a reliable vote for the existing version of Protect IP, is now working hard to amend the bill, according to Senate Democratic aides.”
Then, in Maryland, we soon broke new ground by achieving our first formal Democratic convert: an original cosponsor who would publicly oppose the bill. ( Jerry Moran of Kansas was an early Republican pick-up.)
This is where David Moon’s hobby of editing a Maryland state politics blog would prove invaluable. Senator Ben Cardin (a PIPA sponsor) was nervous about a particular challenger in his April 2012 Democratic primary. With the election but months away, we signaled these dynamics to our coalition partners and went about using Moon’s online perch to drum up discontent among Maryland residents about Cardin’s support for PIPA. The senator should have already been receiving a barrage of communications about the bill, but we sought to crank up their volume and resonance.
Soon Cardin’s constituents who were employed in the tech sector began requesting meetings with him, and we aggressively pushed social media efforts to pressure Cardin to ditch the bill. In tandem, we made sure to send evidence of the unrest to Cardin’s campaign staff: campaign apparatchiks always have a finger to the air to detect shifting political winds, which can hit them with gale force before the much more insulated Hill staffers know a light breeze was ever blowing. In early January, Cardin put out a statement responding to the controversy.
I have heard from many constituents in person, online, and through calls and correspondence regarding the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Individuals and groups continue to meet with my staff and provide detailed information that is helpful as we seek to find a better path forward. There is a common awareness that something must be done to stop this theft of American intellectual property.
PIPA is narrowly tailored legislation that does differ from the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA); however, there are real concerns still to be addressed. For example, I was very pleased to hear that Senator Leahy has proposed further study of the potential impact on how ISPs respond to rogue websites, putting those provisions on hold … I would not vote for final passage of PIPA, as currently written, on the Senate floor.
It was replete with the standard fear mongering about piracy, but we were thrilled to have finally picked off a Democratic sponsor. He would prove the only one to publicly disclaim the bill, though others maneuvered behind the scenes to ensure they’d not have to cast a vote on it.
The legislation was in a free fall now, in both the House and the Senate.
SOPA/PIPA supporters thought they had already lined up the votes they needed for passage. The charts above from VentureBeat show just how much of a resource advantage our opponents had compared with our side.
But the money disparity failed to rule the day. An angry Rupert Murdoch expresses exasperation as it becomes increasingly apparent that his policy wishes were likely not to be granted.