Hacking Politics How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet EDITED BY DAVID MOON, PATRICK RUFFINI, AND DAVID SEGAL Hacking Politics THE ULTIMATE DOCUMENTATION OF THE ULTIMATE INTERNET KNOCK-DOWN BATTLE! Hacking Politics From Aaron to Zoe—they’re here, detailing what the SOPA/PIPA battle was like, sharing their insights, advice, and personal observations. Hacking How Geeks, Politics includes original contributions by Aaron Swartz, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Lawrence Lessig, Rep. Ron Paul, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian, Cory Doctorow, Kim Dotcom and many other technologists, activists, and artists. Progressives, Hacking Politics is the most comprehensive work to date about the SOPA protests and the glorious defeat of that legislation. Here are reflections on why and how the effort worked, but also a blow-by-blow the Tea Party, account of the battle against Washington, Hollywood, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that led to the demise of SOPA and PIPA. Gamers, Anarchists DAVID MOON, former COO of the election reform group FairVote, is an attorney and program director for the million-member progressive Internet organization Demand Progress. Moon, Moon, and Suits Teamed Up PATRICK RUFFINI is founder and president at Engage, a leading digital firm in Washington, D.C. During the SOPA fight, he founded “Don’t Censor the to Defeat SOPA and Net” to defeat governmental threats to Internet freedom. Prior to starting Engage, Ruffini led digital campaigns for the Republican Party. Ruffini, Save the Internet DAVID SEGAL, executive director of Demand Progress, is a former Rhode Island state representative. While a state legislator, Segal pushed progressive initiatives involving the environment, affordable housing, civil rights and Segal EDITED BY civil liberties. He has written for many publications, among them the New York Times and Boston Globe. DAVID MOON, PATRICK RUFFINI, OR Books www.orbooks.com Cover design by Bathcat Ltd AND DAVID SEGAL Hacking Politics Hacking Politics How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet EDITED BY DAVID MOON, PATRICK RUFFINI, AND DAVID SEGAL OR Books New York • London All essays © 2013 by the various authors. All essays in Hacking Politics are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at [email protected] Assistant editor: Joshua Bauchner Published by OR Books, New York and London Visit our website at www.orbooks.com First printing 2013 Typeset by Lapiz Digital, Chennai, India. Printed by BookMobile in the United States and CPI Books Ltd in the United Kingdom. The US printed edition of this book comes on Forest Stewardship Council-certified 30% recycled paper. The printer, BookMobile, is 100% wind-powered. ISBN 978-1-939293-04-6 paperback ISBN 978-1-939293-06-0 e-book The following honorary co-publishers made substantial contributions to the funding of Hacking Politics via the Indiegogo crowd-sourcing platform. We’re grateful for their support. Anonymous Anonymous Anonymous Anthony Aiuto Kelly Birr Rosario Dawson Eric Decker Luke Gotszling Jim Lastinger Marian Maxwell Robert R Miles II Maxim Nekrasov Daniel R Quintiliani Michael Sriqui Eric Usher TABLE OF CONTENTS A Moment for Aaron VII Foreword by the Editors XI Hacking Politics: TLDR 1 PART 1: The World Before SOPA/PIPA 38 AARON SWARTZ For Me, It All Started with a Phone Call 39 CORY DOCTOROW The History of the Copyright Wars 44 JOSH LEVY Before SOPA There Was Net Neutrality 49 MIKE MASNICK COICA, PIPA, and SOPA Are Censorship 54 PART 2: The SOPA/PIPA Battle 58 DAVID SEGAL Now I Work for Demand Progress 59 PATRICK RUFFINI Beginning on the Right 62 DAVID MOON Demand Progress Needs a “Washington Guy” 68 GABRIEL LEVITT SOPA’s Elevation of Profits Over Patients: The Online Pharmacy Story 72 PATRICK RUFFINI Lobbying Republicans Through the Summer 77 DAVID SEGAL The Tea Party Enters the Fray 81 DAVID SEGAL AND DAVID MOON Gamers and Justin Bieber Join the Cause 85 DAVID MOON Clashes With the Big Guns 90 DAVID SEGAL Labor Sides with the Bosses 92 JONNY 5 Turning the Tide on SOPA 99 DAVID SEGAL What Was Lamar Smith Thinking? 103 PATRICK RUFFINI A Punch in the Gut 107 TIFFINIY CHENG Waking the Sleeping Giant 113 AARON SWARTZ Who’s Crazy Now? 117 DAVID SEGAL Nearing the Point of No Return 119 PATRICK RUFFINI The Markup 125 ANDREW MCDIARMID AND DAVID SOHN Bring in the Nerds: The Importance of Technical Experts in Defeating SOPA and PIPA 133 ERNESTO FALCON People Powered Politics 140 DAVID SEGAL AND DAVID MOON To the White House 148 DEREK SLATER On the White House’s Statement 152 OCCUPY WALL STREET Proposal to Reach Consensus on Statement Against the Stop Online Piracy Act 155 TIFFINIY CHENG The Blackout 158 DAVID SEGAL Congress Says: “This Can’t be Happening” 161 SUICIDE GIRLS I Live, Work, Play, and Love Online 163 OPEN CONGRESS Blowing Congress Wide Open 167 ALEXIS OHANIAN Why Reddit Helped Kill SOPA 171 DAVID SEGAL If Reddit’s Turned Off, Maybe They’ll Leave the House That Day 174 PATRICK RUFFINI Internet 1, Congress 0 176 ZOE LOFGREN Championing Technology and Free Speech in Congress Was Lonely … But Not Anymore 181 AARON SWARTZ After the Blackout 188 LARRY DOWNES Who Really Stopped SOPA—and Why 190 EDWARD J. BLACK Legislative Fights Are Like Icebergs 198 CASEY RAE-HUNTER Not in Our Names: Artists Stand Up for Expression 204 ELIZABETH STARK I Stopped SOPA and So Did You 207 BEN HUH Why Did the Anti-SOPA/PIPA Movement Go Viral So Quickly? 210 DAVE DAYEN The Internet Beat SOPA and PIPA: And Mean the Entire Damn Thing 212 DAVID MOON A Political Coming of Age 216 PATRICK RUFFINI This Time, the System Actually Mostly Worked 220 PART 3: Some Activism Since SOPA 221 DAVID SEGAL AND DAVID MOON Cyber Security and Party Platforms 222 DEREK KHANNA Fallout from the Copyfight 227 JOSHUA BAUCHNER The Seizure of Dajaz1 232 NICOLE POWERS An Interview with Julia O’Dwyer 237 DEMAND PROGRESS Raps with Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom 247 PART 4: What We’ve Learned 253 YOCHAI BENKLER ET AL Glimpses of a Networked Public Sphere 254 DAVID KARPF Reflecting on the SOPA Blackout: Why Did It Work, and What Does It Mean? 266 DAVID SEGAL That Was Amazing. Can We Do It Again Sometime? 270 PART 5: Where Do We Go from Here? 274 RON PAUL The Battle for Internet Freedom Is Critical for the Liberty Movement 275 ERIN MCKEOWN A Case for Digital Activism by Artists 279 BRAD BURNHAM On the Freedom to Innovate 282 MARVIN AMMORI SOPA and the Popular First Amendment 286 CORY DOCTOROW Blanket Licenses: One Path Forward in Copyright Reform 289 LAWRENCE LESSIG The Internet Can Help Strike at the Root 291 Conclusion 294 A MOMENT FOR AARON: 1986–2013 Aaron Swartz speaks at the New York City anti-SOPA rally on January 18th, 2012 This book was constructed over the course of the fall, and we intended to release it earlier this winter, but then tragedy struck: our friend and colleague Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11th, while under federal indictment for downloading too many academic articles housed by the online cataloguing service called JSTOR. The shockwave was powerful: thousands have attended memorial services across the country, hundreds of news stories have been writ- ten. As of the writing of this foreword, there are at least a dozen long-form articles being drafted about Aaron’s life and his death, and multiple documentary films being edited. A swarm of events that were to commemorate the anniver- sary of the January 18th Internet blackout became bittersweet remembrances of our fallen ally. Aaron has largely been memorialized as an advocate for copyright reform, information access, and Internet freedom. He was indeed such, but VII HACKING POLITICS he was also so much more. He probably first cared about those causes for their own sakes, but his work on them provided a window into politics that made it impossible to ignore broader systemic corruption and injustices. He wasn’t a techno-utopian who believed that open access and an open Internet would alone fix all that ails humanity; he came to believe that a constant, directed, ideologically left-leaning layer of activism needed to be built on top of these platforms. This transformation is perhaps best elucidated by Aaron himself in his own words, from a talk he gave at the Freedom to Connect conference in 2012. Here’s how he reacted when his close friend Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation first told him about the bill that would become SOPA: “Oh, Peter,” I said. “I don’t care about copyright law. Maybe you’re right, maybe Hollywood is right, but either way is it really such a big deal? I’m not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Health care. Financial reform. Those are the sorts of issues I work on. Not something obscure like copyright.” I could hear Peter grumbling. “Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. But it doesn’t matter for right now. Because this isn’t a bill about copyright.” “It’s not?” “No, it’s a bill about freedom of speech.” You can see that his focus, more and more, was on matters of economic and social justice—but these new passions were synthesized with the old, as neither was enough on its own: to realize one’s vision of a better world, one must know how the world works (open access) and be able to share that information (free- dom of speech) and be able to organize towards those ends (freedom to connect, online and off).