The Honorable Al Franken

United States Senator
Minnesota
May 26, 2011

Senate Judiciary Committee
Statement of Senator Franken on the
Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and
Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT IP) Act of 2011 (S. 968)
May 26, 2011

Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to take a moment to tell you that I was pleased to join as an original cosponsor of your bill. As a copyright holder and a member of four of the unions that strongly support this bill, I understand and appreciate how important it is that we halt online piracy.

I was glad to see you made a number of changes to the bill from the last Congress. And I still think we could do more to narrowly tailor the actions taken by Internet service providers and other third parties to block access to illegal content. I hope we can continue to work together to identify ways for ISPs, search engines, and others to block individual websites or sub-domains containing infringing content--rather than blocking the entire domain.

When there is a reasonable and technically feasible way to narrow the scope of a blocking order, we should be going that route--so we don't inadvertently block legitimate speech.

Thank you again, Mr. Chairman for your work on this important issue, and I look forward to working with you on this in the coming months.