year, but the year before that, September 2010. And I got a phone call from my friend

Peter. "Aaron," he said, "there’s an amazing bill that you have to take a look at." "What

is it?" I said. "It’s called COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeiting

Act." "But, Peter," I said, "I don’t care about copyright law. Maybe you’re right.

Maybe Hollywood is right. But either way, what’s the big deal? I’m not going to

waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Healthcare, financial reform—those

are the issues that I work on, not something obscure like copyright law." I could hear

Peter grumbling in the background. "Look, I don’t have time to argue with you," he

said, "but it doesn’t matter for right now, because this isn’t a bill about copyright."

"It’s not?" "No," he said. "It’s a bill about the freedom to connect." Now I was listening.

Peter explained what you’ve all probably long since learned, that this bill would let

the government devise a list of websites that Americans weren’t allowed to visit. On the

next day, I came up with lots of ways to try to explain this to people. I said it was a

great firewall of America. I said it was an Internet black list. I said it was online

censorship. But I think it’s worth taking a step back, putting aside all the rhetoric

and just thinking for a moment about how radical this bill really was. Sure, there are lots

of times when the government makes rules about speech. If you slander a private figure, if

you buy a television ad that lies to people, if you have a wild party that plays booming

music all night, in all these cases, the government can come stop you. But this was something

radically different. It wasn’t the government went to people and asked them to take down

particular material that was illegal; it shut down whole websites. Essentially, it stopped

Americans from communicating entirely with certain groups. There’s nothing really like

it in U.S. law. If you play loud music all night, the government doesn’t slap you with

an order requiring you be mute for the next couple weeks. They don’t say nobody can

make any more noise inside your house. There’s a specific complaint, which they ask you to

specifically remedy, and then your life goes on.

The closest example I could find was a case where the government was at war with an adult

bookstore. The place kept selling pornography; the government kept getting the porn declared

illegal. And then, frustrated, they decided to shut the whole bookstore down. But even

that was eventually declared unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment.

So, you might say, surely COICA would get declared unconstitutional, as well. But I

knew that the Supreme Court had a blind spot around the First Amendment, more than anything

else, more than slander or libel, more than pornography, more even than child pornography.

Their blind spot was copyright. When it came to copyright, it was like the part of the

justices’ brains shut off, and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment.

You got the sense that, deep down, they didn’t even think the First Amendment applied when

copyright was at issue, which means that if you did want to censor the Internet, if you

wanted to come up with some way that the government could shut down access to particular websites,

this bill might be the only way to do it. If it was about pornography, it probably would

get overturned by courts, just like the adult bookstore case. But if you claimed it was

about copyright, it might just sneak through.

And that was especially terrifying, because, as you know, because copyright is everywhere.

If you want to shut down WikiLeaks, it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that you’re

doing it because they have too much pornography, but it’s not hard at all to claim that WikiLeaks

is violating copyright, because everything is copyrighted. This speech, you know, the

thing I’m giving right now, these words are copyrighted. And it’s so easy to accidentally

copy something, so easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin

Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website. So if even Orrin

Hatch’s Senate website was found to be violating copyright law, what’s the chance that they

wouldn’t find something they could pin on any of us?

There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet

in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent

like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is

reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing

of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom

to murder?

This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent, loss. If we lost the ability to communicate

with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the Bill of Rights. The freedoms

guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on, would be suddenly

deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out

fundamental rights we had always taken for granted. And I realized that day, talking

to Peter, that I couldn’t let that happen.

But it was going to happen. The bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20th, 2010, a

Monday, and in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the

bottom, it was scheduled for a vote on September 23rd, just three days later. And while, of

course, there had to be a vote—you can’t pass a bill without a vote—the results of

that vote were already a foregone conclusion, because if you looked at the introduction

of the law, it wasn’t just introduced by one rogue eccentric member of Congress; it

was introduced by the chair of the Judiciary Committee and co-sponsored by nearly all the

other members, Republicans and Democrats. So, yes, there’d be a vote, but it wouldn’t

be much of a surprise, because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the

bill before it was even introduced.

Now, I can’t stress how unusual this is. This is emphatically not how Congress works.

I’m not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on Schoolhouse Rock.

I mean, this is not the way Congress actually works. I mean, I think we all know Congress

is a dead zone of deadlock and dysfunction. There are months of debates and horse trading

and hearings and stall tactics. I mean, you know, first you’re supposed to announce

that you’re going to hold hearings on a problem, and then days of experts talking

about the issue, and then you propose a possible solution, you bring the experts back for their

thoughts on that, and then other members have different solutions, and they propose those,

and you spend of bunch of time debating, and there’s a bunch of trading, they get members

over to your cause. And finally, you spend hours talking one on one with the different

people in the debate, try and come back with some sort of compromise, which you hash out

in endless backroom meetings. And then, when that’s all done, you take that, and you

go through it line by line in public to see if anyone has any objections or wants to make

any changes. And then you have the vote. It’s a painful, arduous process. You don’t just

introduce a bill on Monday and then pass it unanimously a couple days later. That just

doesn’t happen in Congress.

But this time, it was going to happen. And it wasn’t because there were no disagreements

on the issue. There are always disagreements. Some senators thought the bill was much too

weak and needed to be stronger: As it was introduced, the bill only allowed the government

to shut down websites, and these senators, they wanted any company in the world to have

the power to get a website shut down. Other senators thought it was a drop too strong.

But somehow, in the kind of thing you never see in Washington, they had all managed to

put their personal differences aside to come together and support one bill they were persuaded

they could all live with: a bill that would censor the Internet. And when I saw this,

I realized: Whoever was behind this was good.

Now, the typical way you make good things happen in Washington is you find a bunch of

wealthy companies who agree with you. Social Security didn’t get passed because some

brave politicians decided their good conscience couldn’t possibly let old people die starving

in the streets. I mean, are you kidding me? Social Security got passed because John D.

Rockefeller was sick of having to take money out of his profits to pay for his workers’

pension funds. Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers?

Now, my point is not that Social Security is a bad thing—I think it’s fantastic.

It’s just that the way you get the government to do fantastic things is you find a big company

willing to back them. The problem is, of course, that big companies aren’t really huge fans

of civil liberties. You know, it’s not that they’re against them; it’s just there’s

not much money in it.

Now, if you’ve been reading the press, you probably didn’t hear this part of the story.

As Hollywood has been telling it, the great, good copyright bill they were pushing was

stopped by the evil Internet companies who make millions of dollars off of copyright

infringement. But it just—it really wasn’t true. I mean, I was in there, in the meetings

with the Internet companies—actually probably all here today. And, you know, if all their

profits depended on copyright infringement, they would have put a lot more money into

changing copyright law. The fact is, the big Internet companies, they would do just fine

if this bill passed. I mean, they wouldn’t be thrilled about it, but I doubt they would

even have a noticeable dip in their stock price. So they were against it, but they were

against it, like the rest of us, on grounds primarily of principle. And principle doesn’t

have a lot of money in the budget to spend on lobbyists. So they were practical about

it. "Look," they said, "this bill is going to pass. In fact, it’s probably going to

pass unanimously. As much as we try, this is not a train we’re going to be able to

stop. So, we’re not going to support it—we couldn’t support it. But in opposition,

let’s just try and make it better." So that was the strategy: lobby to make the bill better.

They had lists of changes that would make the bill less obnoxious or less expensive

for them, or whatever. But the fact remained at the end of the day, it was going to be

a bill that was going to censor the Internet, and there was nothing we could do to stop

it.

So I did what you always do when you’re a little guy facing a terrible future with

long odds and little hope of success: I started an online petition. I called all my friends,

and we stayed up all night setting up a website for this new group, Demand Progress, with

an online petition opposing this noxious bill, and I sent it to a few friends. Now, I’ve

done a few online petitions before. I’ve worked at some of the biggest groups in the

world that do online petitions. I’ve written a ton of them and read even more. But I’ve

never seen anything like this. Starting from literally nothing, we went to 10,000 signers,

then 100,000 signers, and then 200,000 signers and 300,000 signers, in just a couple of weeks.

And it wasn’t just signing a name. We asked those people to call Congress, to call urgently.

There was a vote coming up this week, in just a couple days, and we had to stop it. And

at the same time, we told the press about it, about this incredible online petition

that was taking off. And we met with the staff of members of Congress and pleaded with them

to withdraw their support for the bill. I mean, it was amazing. It was huge. The power

of the Internet rose up in force against this bill. And then it passed unanimously.

Now, to be fair, several of the members gave nice speeches before casting their vote, and

in their speeches they said their office had been overwhelmed with comments about the First

Amendment concerns behind this bill, comments that had them very worried, so worried, in

fact, they weren’t sure that they still supported the bill. But even though they didn’t

support it, they were going to vote for it anyway, they said, because they needed to

keep the process moving, and they were sure any problems that were had with it could be

fixed later. So, I’m going to ask you, does this sound like Washington, D.C., to you?

Since when do members of Congress vote for things that they oppose just to keep the process

moving? I mean, whoever was behind this was good.

And then, suddenly, the process stopped. Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon, put a

hold on the bill. Giving a speech in which he called it a nuclear bunker-buster bomb

aimed at the Internet, he announced he would not allow it to pass without changes. And

as you may know, a single senator can’t actually stop a bill by themselves, but they

can delay it. By objecting to a bill, they can demand Congress spend a bunch of time

debating it before getting it passed. And Senator Wyden did. He bought us time—a lot

of time, as it turned out. His delay held all the way through the end of that session

of Congress, so that when the bill came back, it had to start all over again. And since

they were starting all over again, they figured, why not give it a new name? And that’s when

it began being called PIPA, and eventually SOPA.

So there was probably a year or two of delay there. And in retrospect, we used that time

to lay the groundwork for what came later. But that’s not what it felt like at the

time. At the time, it felt like we were going around telling people that these bills were

awful, and in return, they told us that they thought we were crazy. I mean, we were kids

wandering around waving our arms about how the government was going to censor the Internet.

It does sound a little crazy. You can ask Larry tomorrow. I was constantly telling him

what was going on, trying to get him involved, and I’m pretty sure he just thought I was

exaggerating. Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period. But when the bill came

back and started moving again, suddenly all the work we had done started coming together.

All the folks we talked to about it suddenly began getting really involved and getting

others involved. Everything started snowballing. It happened so fast.