Phoenix Center's Spiwak Slams Attempts to Link Copyright Protections With Web Censorship; EFF Responds
Recent attempts to link stolen MPAA copyright-related documents via the Sony Pictures Entertainment data breach with web censorship are “intentionally and cynically misleading,” Lawrence Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies, said in…
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an op-ed for The Hill Thursday. The stolen copyright documents, which purportedly showed collaborative efforts between the entertainment industry, law firms and ISPs, provoked accusations from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups that the former parties were seeking measures similar to the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (see 1412170050). “Adhering to the old political adage that you never let a serious crisis go to waste, we now see the anti-copyright crowd cynically attempting to use this attack as an excuse to weaken efforts to combat online piracy,” Spiwak said. “Seeking to pursue all lawful means to protect valuable intellectual property is not the moral equivalent of Web censorship,” he said. The Sony documents show that MPAA and other movie studios “are still pursuing the goals of SOPA,” Mitch Stoltz, EFF staff attorney, said in an interview. “That was true before the Sony hack and it’s true now,” he said. Spiwak’s argument is “typical” of those who defend MPAA’s “censorship strategy,” in that they usually fail to “wrestle with or acknowledge the harms that come with more draconian” copyright enforcement, Stoltz said. “Examples abound” of copyright being used to “suppress speech on the Internet for any number of illegitimate reasons,” he said. “That’s the definition of censorship.”