Testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives on copyright legislation

Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM ET

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Director of Public Policy

This morning Google copyright policy counsel Katherine Oyama will testify before the House Judiciary Committee on the Stop Online Piracy Act. You can read her written and her oral testimony.

We strongly support the goal of the bill -- cracking down on offshore websites that profit from pirated and counterfeited goods -- but we’re concerned the way it’s currently written would threaten innovation, jobs, and free expression. We are not alone in our concerns. Earlier this week, we joined eight other Internet companies -- AOL, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Zynga -- in a letter to Congress, echoing concerns voiced by industry associations, entrepreneurs, small business owners, librarians, law professors, venture capitalists, human rights advocates, cybersecurity experts, public interest groups, and tens of thousands of private citizens.

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 combat it through our Content ID system on YouTube, our efforts to make copyright work better online, and our work to keep counterfeiters out of our ads system.

Katherine’s testimony will offer recommendations for more targeted ways to combat foreign “rogue” websites that are dedicated to copyright infringement and trademark counterfeiting, while preserving the innovation and dynamism that has made the Internet such an important driver of economic growth and job creation.