Sharing my Personal Email

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 2:59 PM,  wrote:

Dear Joel:

Thank you for contacting me about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). I wanted to update you on my views on this important issue.

I am opposed to SOPA and PIPA in their current forms. I believe that these bills create unacceptable threats to free speech and free access to the internet. I have heard from many of you in Northwest Washington who are deeply concerned about the potential impacts of SOPA and PIPA. 

Online piracy is a serious problem that costs U.S. businesses billions of dollars. Government agencies must be empowered to stop and prosecute intellectual property thieves. But in doing so we cannot undermine freedom of speech or jeopardize the free flow of information on the internet. I will work with my colleagues to see that any final anti-online piracy legislation protects the internet and does not encroach on free speech rights. 

Please be assured that I will keep your thoughts in mind should I have the opportunity to vote on any legislation that would impact online piracy and internet freedom on the House floor.

Again, thank you for contacting me.  I encourage you to contact me in the future about this or any other issue of importance to you.

Sincerely,

Rick Larsen
United States Representative
Washington State, 2nd District

Thank you for your decision, Congressman Larson. 

I hope that you will reconsider the belief that piracy is "a serious problem that costs U.S. businesses billions of dollars," because research, including that from the CBO says otherwise.  As long as legislators continue to accept, at face value, what the ESA and Hollywood are shoveling (especially as it relates to estimates of financial loss), they'll inevitably support another measure as equally flawed as SOPA/PIPA.  

Furthermore, the notion that Government agencies must be empowered to stop and prosecute intellectual property thieves would imply that the government is not so empowered now, which it clearly is.  Do you know how many websites have been shutdown by Homeland Security/ICE?  If I recall correctly, it was 300 not too long ago--all without any hint of due process by the way, in a despicable corruption of power that nobody in Congress seems interested in (see Dajaz1.com).  Just last week, our government arrested, on foreign soil no less, the administrators of Megaupload.com, a website with 150 million subscribers.   This arrest has caused similar cloud-storage businesses to suspend their operations entirely or prohibit their use by Americans.  As long as the government can fundamentally disrupt (and eventually kill) a multi-billion dollar industry like they just did to this sector of IT (which, I might add, includes Microsoft and Amazon), we should not lament their lack of power. 

I hope you'll keep in mind that computers are little more than particularly advanced copy-and-transmit machines.  As long as they exist there will be unsanctioned copying.  Rick Falkvinge said it quite succinctly:

General-purpose networked computers, free and anonymous speech, and sustained civil liberties make it impossible to maintain this distribution monopoly of digitizable information. As technical progress can't be legislated against, basic civil liberties would have to go to maintain the crumbling monopoly. And these are the laws we're seeing on the table. 

Please do not fall on the side of the copyright/patent monopolists.  This is THE big fight of the next few decades as it's no longer solely about a paycheck for a record executive.  The stakes, now, are lives (in the case of pharmaceutical patents, for example), livelihoods, and civil liberties.  

Thank you for reading.

Best Regards,

Joel Enbom, Granite Falls