Letter to my senator about the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act

If you don't know about the COICA, it is a bill intended to get rid of "piracy" on the internet. The goal is to protect the investments of groups like the RIAA and MPAA. The way they intend to do this is to force any internet service provider to blacklist any site that is deemed inappropriate. The implications of a bill like this are crazy. I felt I had to take action so I wrote this letter to the cosponsor of this bill from my state.

This email is regarding S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). Where does the authority to be a censor of the entire internet come from? How is this bill not a direct violation of the Constitution? One could have raised the argument that freedom of speech for a company is different from freedom of speech for a person, but that precedent has clearly been set in regards to campaign finance. As a republican shouldn't you be about spending less money and having less government interference? Please at least explain your motives for introducing this bill aside from pressure from the RIAA and MPAA. If a website is doing something illegal, they need to be prosecuted in a court of law. It shouldn't be up for companies like VIACOM to decide which websites they allow their content on.

This type of legislation opens the door for some seriously bad things. For example, somewhere down the line if someone were to post an unfavorable review of some company's newest IP. The new company can claim that based on videos, screenshots etc that it is copyright infringement (even though it clearly falls under "Fair Use") and the website owner runs the risk of being erased from the internet. Since the precedent has been set with campaign contribution laws, corporations are equal to people and speech is equal to money (because every viewpoint has to have enough support/money to be seen) the company/person with the most money has the most speech. The little guy does not stand a chance of surviving in an environment like that.

This bill is UN-American to its core and would surely have our founding fathers spinning in their graves. Freedom means that you have to allow for bad things to happen. As terrible as it sounds, you have to give people the opportunity to do the wrong thing, otherwise it isn't freedom at all. Certainly law breakers should be punished, but this type of legislation is meant to be preventative. If the choice isn't there to do the wrong thing, then it isn't a choice at all.

Please respond as I am genuinely curious about how this came about and how an educated American could possibly support it.
-[echotech]

You can find more about the bill here. Feel free to write your representative here, it only takes a minute.