You may have noticed something different about the internet today – many of your favorite websites are taking a visible stand against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which both are currently under review by Congress.  Some sites, such as Wikipedia and Reddit, are blacking out their sites today in protest of the bills. Other sites, like TED, are raising awareness about SOPA & PIPA by sharing TED Talks about the importance of net neutrality.

SOPA and PIPA are two pieces of legislation that were written as a way to address copyright infringement on the internet.  While these relatively obscure bills seem to have gotten a lot of attention in the past few days, the debate has been going on since May 2011 when PIPA was first introduced. Those who are against these bills are in no way supporting piracy; in fact, nobody is disagreeing that protecting intellectual property is an important issue worth addressing.  However, the criticism of the bills is about the method in which they are trying to solve this problem.  Through SOPA and PIPA, law officials and copyright holders have the ability to shut down sites and sue website owners who they believe are promoting online piracy, rather than targeting the individuals themselves.  This is in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Safe Harbor provisions that prevent websites from being held responsible for how individuals use (or abuse) their product – it’s the same logic behind why you can’t sue a car company when somebody gets killed in car accident, for example. Furthermore, the bill enforces that these sites must be removed from search engine results, barred by Internet Service Providers, and cannot partner with online advertisers and payment partners – this is where the real damage occurs, and can pose a long-term threat to the integrity of the internet.  There is a lot of information available online about these two bills, and I encourage you to read more to understand the details of this issue. Given how much our business relies on the openness of the Internet, however, SOPA and PIPA could have a damaging impact on innovation, particularly in Healthcare I/T, since so many new HIT initiatives are web applications that rely on the internet’s open structure.  When you strip away the politics and hyperbole coming from both sides of the argument, I believe there are 3 key technical and economic reasons why SOPA and PIPA are flawed:

1. A controlled internet stifles innovation.
The internet has enabled such incredible economic growth because it’s not controlled by anyone. It’s free, it’s open, and allows individuals, organizations, and companies (large and small) to connect with other people, share information, and conduct commerce without any interference.  Vint Cerf, the renowned computer scientist best known for being the founder of the internet, spoke out against SOPA in December by saying the bill would initiate “a worldwide arms race of unprecedented ‘censorship’ of the Web.” If SOPA had been around ten years ago, websites that allowed users to share videos (Youtube), social networks that allowed friends to connect with one another (Facebook), collaborative online encyclopedias (Wikipedia), or online marketplaces for people to buy and sell used goods (eBay) would have quickly been shut down because it would have incorrectly been perceived as promoting piracy and copyright infringement.  These are sites and services that we not only use in our personal lives, but use in our business as well – we are able to connect and engage with consumers, patients, business partners and colleagues because of these tools.

2. Shutting down websites doesn’t protect intellectual property.
If SOPA and PIPA were to pass and websites were blocked, the truth is that it wouldn’t actually stop piracy.  Instead, it will just push a lot of this activity underground into the “darknet”, which is a term to describe private, peer-to-peer file sharing networks that use anonymous IP addresses.  This will ultimately create a more robust “information black market”, which will undermine the internet economy that so many businesses (including ours) have come to rely on.  Additionally, as more and more legitimate services are forced to enter the information black market, it will saturate that underground environment, and will make it exponentially harder to find the real rogue sites that are intentionally trying to increase piracy. 

3. Tampering with DNS compromises internet security.
A major criticism of SOPA and PIPA was that the bill was written by people who aren’t experts in technology and don’t fully understand the lasting technical damages this bill could have.  Internet security is at high risk with SOPA because of the fact that it encourages the manipulation of the Domain Name System.  An example of how SOPA/PIPA will convolute security can be seen with the Domain Name System Security Extension (DNSSEC).  DNSSEC is a separate initiative that is aimed towards making the internet more secure by preventing credit card fraud, unlawful eavesdropping over VoIP, or stealing user passwords, for example.  The effort is aimed at increasing internet trust, which will continue to improve the way we use the internet in productive ways.  SOPA, however, will derail this initiative, because of the way the bill manipulates DNS – it will make it nearly impossible to implement this security program because it will complicate the system, and will in fact make the internet a more unsafe environment than it currently is.

Technology causes disruption – there is no denying it. We’ve seen industries rise and fall because of new technologies, and that’s part of the natural cycle of innovation.  The solution to protecting intellectual property online isn’t to stifle the technology, but instead to focus on new, innovative business models and distribution channels that work in harmony with these tools.  Healthcare has evolved for the better because of information technology, and our business operates more efficiently because of the internet. We should continue to embrace technology disruption and focus on bringing creative healthcare solutions to our patients and serve our business partners more effectively through the open internet.