Oral Testimony of Katherine Oyama, Copyright Counsel, Google Inc. Before the House Judiciary Committee Hearing on H.R.

3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act November 16, 2011 Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Conyers, members of the committee: Thank you for this opportunity to testify not just on behalf of Google but also the Consumer Electronics Association, CCIA, NetCoalition, TechNet, and TechAmerica -- who represent thousands of companies. Google takes the problem of online piracy and counterfeiting very seriously, devoting our best engineering talent and tens of millions of dollars every year to fight it. In the last year, we have: Spent more than $60 million to weed out bad actors from our ad services; Shut down nearly 150,000 AdWords accounts, mostly based on our own counterfeit detection efforts; and so far this year, processed DMCA takedown requests targeting nearly 5 million items

We are as motivated as anyone to get this right; but The Stop Online Piracy Act is not the right approach. SOPA would undermine the legal, commercial and cultural architecture that has propelled the extraordinary growth of Internet commerce over the past decade, a sector that has grown to $2 trillion in annual GDP, including $300 billion from online advertising. Virtually every major Internet technology company -including Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and eBay-- as well as a diverse array of other groups -- from venture capitalists to librarians to musicians -- have expressed serious concern about this bill. Unfortunately, this legislation is overly broad. It undermines the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has, for more than a decade, struck a balance. The DMCA provides copyright owners with immediate recourse when they discover infringement online, while also giving online service providers the certainty they need to invest in the products on which millions of Americans rely. The bill sweeps in innocent websites that have violated no law, and imposes harsh and arbitrary sanctions without due process. The following example shows how the bill, as currently written, would work. Imagine a new website, lets call it Daves Online Emporium, which enables other small businesses to sell clothing and accessories. More than 99% of the sellers are entirely legitimate, but unbeknownst to Daves Emporium, one seller has started offering counterfeit handbags and T-shirts that parody a copyrighted design. The Emporium takes great care to comply with copyright laws, including the takedown and repeat infringer provisions of the DMCA. But under the Stop Online Piracy Act, the entire site could be deemed dedicated to theft based on the violations of just this one seller and the whole business effectively shut down.

Just about any private party a corporation, a copyright troll, or anyone with an axe to grind could send a notice to payment and advertising companies to terminate services to the site, without first involving law enforcement or triggering any judicial process. The complaining party has no duty to contact the Emporium directly to resolve the issue before going straight to ad and payment providers. If the Emporium fails to respond with a counternotice within 5 days, the site could effectively be put out of business.

Facing these potential risks, Dave might think twice about establishing his online emporium in the first place. Countless websites of all kinds commercial, social, personal could be shuttered or put out of business based on allegations that may or may not be valid. The resulting cloud of legal uncertainty would threaten new investment, entrepreneurship, and innovation. In a new study of venture capitalists released today, more than 80 percent said that weakening the safe harbor provisions of digital copyright laws would have a recession-like impact on new investment. At the same time, the law imposes new and unclear obligations on Internet service providers to take technically feasible and reasonable measures to block access to sites and remove them from search results, turning providers into de-facto censors. This wont work. As long as there is money to be made pushing pirated and counterfeit products, tech-savvy criminals around the world will find ways to sell these products online. Ordering ISPs and search engines to disappear web sites will not change this fundamental reality. We urge you instead to target the problem at the source -- shut down illegal foreign sites by cutting off their revenue. We support legislation that builds on the DMCA. Our proposal would empower the Justice Department to target foreign sites that violate current law. A court could then order the advertisers and payment services, in which Google would be included, to cut off ads and payments to these sites. Google has been working with the Committee on such a solution for the past 6 months and we will continue to do so. When all is said and done, we must address online piracy effectively in ways that continue to allow the Internet to drive this economy and this country forward. Thank you.