expression, creativity, and competition called the “Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies (SMART) Copyright Act of 2022.”
So, while I talked about the new horrors of the SMART Copyright Act on my other post, I figured I should make it its own post to talk about these recent developments.
For those who don’t know about the act, the article linked above gives a good showing on why it’s bad, along with Wikimedia’s own but TL/DR it’s basically a law designed to give the copyright office the power to force websites to use copyright filter programs ala Content ID; at the behest of megacorps lobbying on which ones they think should be used.
To get even more TL/DR. it is SOPA 2.0
And whispers from people in the know say that they are trying to shove it into a larger “must pass” omnibus bill, as one of its cosponsors has done before with other bad copyright laws such as the CASE Act; even using the same staffer he did to help push that through.
This would mean that this bill would end up undemocratically avoiding even the joke of a congressional review process that the equally awful EARN IT Act got by lying to congresspeople that it’s not a controversial bill when it totally is.
And, wouldn’t you know it, Biden’s trying to get a massive spending package for aid to Ukraine passed by Memorial Day, of the kind they add these sorts of awful bills to. And the best way that we can kill it is to shout our senators’ heads off; all of them not just the ones on the various committes.
Call them, write them, tell them this bill cannot be allowed to be rushed through, because it will devastate the open internet as we know it, it will expand the overreach of technologies that currently hurt artists (ala Content ID) to a far greater extent, and increase the burden on small sites manyfold.
Hell, contact your Representatives and say you do not want a House version of the Ukraine package or any aid package at all to contain an equivalent to this bill, because that sort of thing is what’s holding up the similar “awful legislation jammed into a must-pass bill” that is the SHOP SAFE Act at the moment, so it might work here.
Please, either way, any way you can, contact your Congresspeople and tell them that copyright law online is draconian enough as it is; to the point where it should be rolled back rather than pushed forward; and we don’t need another bad bill shoved without our consent in right under our noses to make it worse.
