Mr Abrams,

In comments made this week at the Center for American Progress, MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd called comparisons between proposed American Intellectual Property laws and censorship of political speech by foreign repressive regimes "absolutely reprehensible" and an "outrageous and false comparison." He went on to reference an oped that you published in the Washington Post, in which you wrote "The proposition that efforts to enforce the Copyright Act on the Internet amount to some sort of censorship, let alone Chinese-level censorship, is not merely fanciful. It trivializes the pain inflicted by actual censorship that occurs in repressive states throughout the world."

In November of this year, a security researcher named Trevor Eckhart discovered that a computer program developed by a firm called CarrierIQ was collecting information from consumer's mobile telephones without their permission. CarrierIQ responded to Mr. Eckhart's criticism of their software by threatening to sue him. CarrierIQ sent Mr. Eckhart a letter in which they made a number of bogus Intellectual Property claims and demanded that he remove his criticism of their product from his website.

These events directly undermine your assertion that there are no legitimate concerns about the abuse of Intellectual Property laws for the purposes of stifling criticism and dissent in the United States. Unfortunately, Mr. Eckhart's experience is not usual. Bogus Intellectual Property claims are often made by large firms to quash criticism and other undesired but Constitutionally protected speech. These tactics are successful because individual citizens often don't have the financial resources to defend themselves against bogus legal threats.

This is why it is so important that Intellectual Property laws contain safeguards that prevent their abuse. The original draft of the Stop Online Piracy Act required payment processors and advertising networks to pull the plug on websites they serve within 5 days of receiving an allegation of wrong doing from an alleged copyright holder. Absolutely no independent third party was placed in the process to evaluate the legitimacy of the allegations. Such a process is ripe for abuse, and abuse of these processes does actually happen in practice.

Hollywood and its allies would be well served by pulling their heads out of the sand and acknowledging that serious, documentable First Amendment problems exist with these processes in the United States. If Hollywood truly cares about freedom of speech on the Internet, they should invest their vast policy analysis resources into developing proposals that contain real, functional safeguards and severe consequences for those who would abuse them.

Regards,
Tom Cross
Individual Citizen