With Leahy Under Fire, an Online Piracy Bill Is Indefinitely Detained (Seven Days)

January 25, 2012

By Kevin J. Kelley

Is Sen. Patrick Leahy losing his sense of political timing? For most of his 37 years in the U.S. Senate, Leahy, 71, has been a defender of civil liberties, earning praise from First Amendment advocates and right-to-privacy groups.

But lately, Leahy has ignited outrage across the nation — and among Vermonters — for supporting two bills that critics say give the government too much power.

Leahy is catching heat for voting yes on the National Defense Authorization Act, a Pentagon spending bill that permits indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, even if they’re U.S. citizens. Recently, Occupy Vermont activists confronted Leahy staffers in the senator’s Burlington office over the legislation, an altercation posted on YouTube. Numerous listeners meanwhile lambasted Leahy on Vermont Public Radio’s call-in show, “Vermont Edition.”

“You have sold out the republic; you have sold out the constitution,” one caller, who identified himself as “Robert from Burlington,” told Leahy.

But most of the outrage from civil libertarians relates to Leahy’s sponsorship of the antipiracy legislation known as PIPA, or the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Supporters of PIPA frame the bill as a reasonable response to the systematic theft of copyrighted material by online pirates based in autocratic countries, such as China, that do not respect the ownership rights of content creators. The entertainment industry group Creative America claims that online piracy costs the U.S. economy $100 billion and thousands of jobs every year, figures that are difficult to verify.

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