This is not wholly surprising, but after some debate and some half-hearted attempts at pretending they care about the public's privacy rights, the House has passed CISPA, 288 votes against 127. The vote breakdown did not go fully along party lines, though it was clearly Republican driven. 196 Republicans voted for it, while just 29 voted against it (despite numerous conservative groups coming out against the bill). The Democrats split down the middle. 92 Dems voted for it and 98 against. If you compare this to last year, it looks like a lot more Democrats went from opposing to being in favor of trampling your privacy rights. Last year, 140 Dems voted against CISPA and only 42 for it. Either way, this seems like a pretty bi-partisan decision to shaft the American public on their privacy rights. That said, there is still the threat of a Presidential veto (though, with the vote today, the House is close to being able to override a veto). The bigger question is now the Senate, which couldn't agree on a cybersecurity bill last year, and has shown no signs of improvement this year. If you want to protect your privacy, it's time to focus on the Senate, and make sure they know not to pass a privacy-destroying bill like CISPA.

While there's been plenty of attention paid over the weekend to the fact that the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the conservative caucus of House Republicans, pulled its report on copyright reform after some entertainment industry lobbyists hit the phones/emails late Friday/early Saturday (and, no, it wasn't directly to RSC, for the most part, but to "friendly" members asking them to express their "displeasure" with the report to the RSC leadership). But we shouldn't let that distract from the simple fact that the report was brilliant -- perhaps the most insightful and thoughtful piece of scholarship on copyright to come out of a government body in decades. You can still read the whole thing as uploaded to Archive.org.

Some people have set up a petition at Change.org asking the RSC to republish and stand behind the policy brief. Others are saying you should contact your own Representatives directly and ask them to support the report. For example, Dave Weinberger wrote a wonderful letter to his own Representative, telling him that he should take a look at the report, and that he should use it as a starting point "for a conversation this country very much needs."

It seems unlikely that the RSC will bring it back, despite the quality of the report. But one hopes that the massive outpouring of support (seriously, just check Twitter) will lead politicians from both parties to recognize that sensible and smart copyright reform is a topic that gets people excited -- and one thing they're sick of is decades of both parties simply falling all over themselves to distort copyright to favor a few dominant Hollywood players.

Because the GOP has chickened out, we're going to try to do a series of posts analyzing the various aspects of the report, starting with the three myths about copyright it debunks, followed by four policy recommendations, to see if we can further the discussion. Look for those posts in the coming days and weeks.

Over the weekend, I saw an article on Salon about how shameful it is that supporters of President Obama, who were loud in their condemnation of attacks on civil liberties by George W. Bush, seemed to ignore that President Obama has been worse in many ways (despite many public promises to the contrary). We've already noted that the Democratic Party -- which had fixing civil liberties abuses in its 2008 platform -- has removed all traces of that from the new platform. You would think that, for those who believe strongly in civil liberties, this would be a major concern. Rather than fix them, President Obama continued or expanded many of the very questionable policies of his predecessor, and then added a number of terrifying new ones.

Of course, if civil liberties is the issue you vote over, the other major party offers you no help either (as you should already know, based on Bush's presidency). As Adam Serwer notes, when debating issues of civil liberties, there really is no significant choice between Obama and Romney on this particular issue. There may be some differences at the margins, but that's about it.

Serwer's piece argues that much of this is driven by the American public, who seem particularly fond of giving up our own civil liberties in the face of non-stop fear mongering about terrorism. It seems likely that there is also something to the fact that, once in power, people generally don't like to scale back their own ability to "do stuff." Either way, it amazes me that avid supporters of one side or the other, who absolutely hate the idea of the "other side" getting into power, never seem concerned about how the other side will make use of the same policies they put in place to support themselves.

There are, of course, real differences in many of the other policies from the two candidates, but the lack of significant differences on civil liberties is a real shame. We should demand better.

Last week we wrote about weaknesses in the Republican's platform on internet freedom, noting that the MPAA's endorsement of it showed that it wasn't recognizing the importance of fixing copyright law, rather than expanding it. And, of course, we've now been pointing out significant issues with the Democrat's platform as well. Once again, on internet and innovation issues it falls down completely when it comes to copyright and patent issues.

Tim Lee has a perceptive piece (as per usual) noting that both party platforms appear to be in denial about the need for copyright and patent reform. He also mocks how both talk about "vigorous" enforcement of certain laws when they relate to the internet (porn for the Rs and copyright for the Ds).

But the reality is that neither party is willing to take a really principled stand on the need to reform copyright and patent laws in the name of freedom and innovation. That's not surprising, really. Doing so in either party would upset some of the "old guard" who tend to donate a lot of money to political campaigns. But, from the viewpoint of what really matters when it comes to internet freedom and innovation, it's yet another sign that the major parties don't want to deal with reality.

We were already skeptical of the GOP's claims about supporting "internet freedom," and it seems that our concerns have been more or less confirmed by the fact that the MPAA seems positively thrilled by the GOP's official position on internet freedom. If the MPAA is pleased with someone's policy outline for the internet, you can bet that it's bad policy. Here's what Chris Dodd had to say:

The Republican Party platform language strikes a very smart balance: it emphasizes the importance of us doing more as a nation to protect our intellectual property from online theft while underscoring the critical importance of protecting internet freedom. As the party points out, the internet has been for its entire existence a source of innovation, and it is intellectual property that helps drive that innovation. Copyright is the cornerstone of innovation; it allows creators to benefit from what they create. As Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- herself once a Republican elected official -- wrote, '[I]t should not be forgotten that the Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression. By establishing a marketable right to the use of one's expression, copyright supplies the economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas.'

I agree wholeheartedly with my friends in the Republican Party that we must protect the free flow of information on the internet while also protecting American innovators. It is imperative to our national economy and our national identity that we protect an internet that works for everyone.

As he is prone to doing, Dodd is presenting a very distorted version of history and intellectual property. There is no evidence (none, zip, zilch, zero) that "intellectual property helps drive innovation." Historically, it's been shown that competition and need is what drives innovation -- whereas intellectual property laws tend to lock in place legacy players, holding back disruptive innovation. Either way, the MPAA's support pretty much shows that the Republican's "internet freedom" platform isn't serious.

We've discussed the push to get both major political parties in the US to adopt language around internet freedom in their official platforms. With the RNC Convention happening, there's been some news that they are, in fact, putting in some internet freedom language, but the specifics do matter. The Daily Caller report indicated that the language was based on the manifesto that Ron Paul and Rand Paul released a few weeks ago, which had serious problems (such as arguing that the public domain was a "collectivist plot" and that the end-to-end principles of the internet were also some sort of awful conspiracy). One would hope that cooler heads would prevail.

Of course, at the same time, there are numerous reports saying that the same GOP platform will include significant anti-porn language. The GOP has had anti-child porn language before, which makes sense, but they're expanding it to porn in general. And it's being cheered on by various groups who seem... a little excessively happy about this (you should see some of the press releases I've been getting from groups in favor of this). They argue that porn, in general, is "a major, major problem." And Mitt Romney seems to support this, arguing that "every new computer sold in this country after I'm president has installed on it a filter to block all pornography."

No matter what you think of pornography, it's hard to square the idea of supporting internet freedom (or freedom of speech in general) with mandatory filters. Porn filters already exist and are widely available in the market. For those who wish to put them on their computers, it's not like they have a lack of options. To make them mandatory seems highly questionable, and it's difficult to see how one can argue for both internet freedom and mandatory filters at the same time.

Of course, this is politics that we're talking about, where it's pretty common to hold two completely conflicting viewpoints at the same time. I expect we'll see similar contradictions in a couple weeks when the Democrats hold their convention as well...

There's been an awful lot of important talk about internet freedom and its importance this year. It's certainly permeated the political sphere. But is it a national political agenda item? We'll see. The Republican National Convention kicks off in a couple weeks, followed a few weeks after that by the Democratic National Convention. The folks at Demand Progress are urging both parties to add basic internet freedom issues to their official platforms. According to US News, both parties are considering it, with the Republicans saying they'll be discussing the topic at the RNC, while the Democrats have said that early drafts of their platform "advocated Internet freedom globally," though its unclear if the provision remained in.

Either way, both seem to at least recognize that this the internet is a major area of interest for a very large number of voters.

That said, just having it in a party platform may be a bit meaningless if they don't live up to it. But recognizing the issue is, at the very least, a first step in truly understanding how important it is. I doubt very much that the leadership of either party truly understands the importance of internet freedom, or is really willing to go all out in support of it. Yet. But, building up interest and general support -- along with the recognition that voters care about this stuff -- is at least an important first step in having politicians recognize that they can't just sell out internet freedom when lobbyists or "friendly" repressive governments come calling.

Well, this is not too surprising, but it is unfortunate. As the Obama administration has said it would veto CISPA, the House has now turned this into a partisan fight. As with IP issues, I tend to think it's dangerous and stupid when privacy fights become partisan. Once the debate is partisan, it seems to lose all sense of reason and perspective and just degrades into name calling. And there's a chance exactly that is happening with CISPA and other cybersecurity bills, as the Republicans are "daring" the Democrats to support these bills, with the political calculus being that if they don't support these bills and something terrible happens (planes falling from the sky, etc.) that they can then blame the Democrats for being soft on cybercrime. That narrative, of course, ignores the very real privacy concerns that are being raised by a variety of parties. It effectively shifts the entire debate away from finding a real solution, and into a situation where some are pressured to accept a bad solution for the sake of political optics.

We've noted how intellectual property issues are historically non-partisan. Sometimes, that's good, because it means that debates on the issues don't fall into typical brain dead partisan arguments. Sometimes, it's bad, in that it basically means both Republicans and Democrats are generally really bad on IP issues... happy to give industries greater and greater monopoly rights for no good reason. However, we noted an interesting thing happening on the way to the collapse of PIPA and SOPA: the Republicans were first to come together as a party and decide to speak out against these bills, recognizing the groundswell of public interest. That resulted in Republican leadership coming out against the bills, and Republican Presidential candidates all rejecting the approach in the bill. The Democrats, who have traditionally been considered more "internet friendly," simply couldn't bring themselves to go against Hollywood and unions -- two regular allies.

However, as many more net savvy Democrats have explained, this appears to be a major miscalculation on the part of Democratic party leadership -- potentially losing an entire younger generation of voters to the Republicans. Already, mutliple strategists have been suggesting that the Republican Party use this as a chance to cozy up with Silicon Valley, despite its typically "blue" leanings (though, generally with a strong libertarian bent). It certainly appears that the Republicans are ready to do just that. House majority leader, Eric Cantor recently tweeted about meeting with Sergey Brin.

The Democratic leadership, however, still doesn't seem to recognize the importance of the tech community and the wider internet. Rather than learning anything from what happened last week, PIPA sponsor Senator Leahy is actually trying to blame the Republicans for killing PIPA. It's (yet again) an amazingly tone deaf response. It's as if he's pushing the internet and the tech community right into the Republicans' arms. Perhaps he's making a bet that those constituencies don't matter as much as Hollywood... but that seems like a pretty risky bet to make.

It really was just a few weeks ago that a Hollywood lobbyist laughed at me (literally) when I suggested that SOPA/PIPA might become a national issue during the Presidential campaign. As he noted, copyright issues just aren't interesting outside of a small group of people. My, how things have changed. After this week's protests made front pages and top stories everywhere, it's not all that surprising that the candidates at the latest GOP debate were asked their opinion of the bills... and all four came out against them. Of course, this seems to fit with the new GOP positioning that they're the anti-SOPA/PIPA party (so sorry Lamar Smith...). Mediaite has the video: And here's a transcript of what each candidate said:

Gingrich: "You are asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood? I am weighing it and thinking fondly of the many left wing people that I am so eager to protect. On the other hand, you have so many people that are technologically advanced such as Google and You Tube and Facebook that say this is totally going to mess up the Internet. The bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable. I believe in freedom and think that we have a patent office, copyright law and if a company believes it has generally been infringed upon it has the right to sue. But the idea that we have the government start preemptively start censoring the Internet and corporations' economic interest is exactly the wrong thing to do."

Romney: "The law as written is far too expansive, far too intrusive and far too threatening of freedom of speech and information carried across the Internet. It would have a depressing impact on one of the fastest growing industries in America. I care deeply about intellectual content going across the Internet and if we can find a way to very narrowly go after those people who are pirating especially those offshore. But a very broad law that gives the government the power to start saying who can pass what to whom, I say no and I am standing for freedom."

Paul: "I am one of the first Republicans to oppose this law and so glad that sentiment has mellowed up here as Republicans have been on the wrong side of this issue and this is a good example on why its good to have someone who can look at civil liberties ... freedom and the constitution bring people together."

Santorum: "I do not support this law and believe it goes too far. But I will not agree with everyone that there isn't something that should be done to protect the intellectual content of people. The internet is not a free zone where anyone can do anything they want to do and trample the rights of other people. Particularly when we are talking about entities off shore. The idea that the government has no role to protect the intellectual property of this company, that's not right. The idea that anything goes on the Internet? Who has that idea. Property rights should be respected."

Santorum's answer is the weakest, obviously -- and isn't too surprising. Just recently he made a statement that was about how online activity should be regulated.

But, really the most interesting part of what happened was not the candidates answering the question, but the audience's response. When John King asked the question and gave a brief explanation of SOPA/PIPA... he also mentioned that CNN's parent company, Time Warner, supported the bill... and the crowd booed loudly. When the candidates -- particularly Gingrich and Paul -- made their claims, the crowd cheered loudly.

The people who are still brushing off the whole protest as "an internet thing" or (even more ridiculous) "a Google thing," still don't seem to realize. Pretty much the entire public has turned against these kinds of bills.