Vinton Cerf, other Internet gurus protest piracy bill
Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's pioneers, and 82 other Internet inventors and engineers have signed an open letter to Congress protesting both a controversial piracy bill known as SOPA and related Internet legislation that they say would "create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure."
The first bill, the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), scheduled to go before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Thursday, makes the streaming of unauthorized content a felony. But, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns, the bill's "vague language would create devastating new tools for silencing legitimate speech all around the Web."
The Protect-IP Act, a bill in the Senate, would do much the same thing. The Business Software Alliance — which includes Microsoft, Apple, Intel and Adobe, and focuses heavily on anti-piracy efforts — is opposed to SOPA, as are major players in tech, including Google, Apple and Facebook.
