Needless to say, sign me up with those who want to stop the SOPA and PIPA bills. Both bills are heavy fisted attempts by Big Content to protect their intellectual property without any concern for the ramifications.
Even if you strongly believe piracy is wrong (and I do), Congress's attempts to legislate technology to protect piracy have been ineffective at best and unconstitutional at worst. How we justify 100,000 USD per violation of copyright for a 0.99USD song under "no cruel and unsual punishment" is beyond me. How SOPA and PIPA won't produce both a chilling effect on free speech is also beyond.
More importantly, both bills CLEARLY violate the concept of Due Process. If you think this is minor, you should investigate some of the cases that have been brought under the old DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). Just the Righthaven fiasco should be a cautionary tale(and Righthaven at least had some justification for pursuing at least some of the cases, they just did it wrong). Even before DMCA, we've seen small websites (and bulletin boards before that) bullied by content owners into shutting off fan created content over copyright and other intellectual property concerns even though they clearly would fall under Fair Use. Software applications have been gutted to comply with a content owners perception that it could potentially be used for pirating content. Now, some people think that prior to trial and with little review of the merits of a case, a site should be effectively shut down.
The sad part is that it's completely ineffective from a technical perspective. All that will happen is that the pirates will move on to other means of contacting one another whilst the legitimate Fair Users or accidental infringers get clobbered by content owners who have their nose out of joint. As the content owners won't be able to stop it with their current laws, they will pursue an even more draconian set of laws in another 5-10 years time.
But: think
how the copyright trolls will use this! Instead of their quasi-legal
extortion letter saying "pay us or we sue", it will say "pay us or we'll
have your site taken off the internet".
We've seen that there have been reductions in the Due Process violating provisions due to all of the pushback, but still, the idea that I would have to monitor every site that I link to in order to determine if it hosts violating content is nuts. What it means is that I will not be able to cite any references in any blog post for fear of the site I'm referring having some smattering of violating content. I not only need to check it before hand, but after as well. What does this mean for blogger, wordpress, tumblr, etc? All blog hosting websites would basically be put on notice that they need to monitor every single site that one of their users posts a link to. While we're at it, why not pass a law making restaurant guests liable for dining at a restaurant that buys its tomatoes from a distributor that buys from a farm that uses illegal immigrant labor. It's about the same thing.
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