There has been much ado about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was proposed in the House; mainly because it is a monumentally stupid piece of legislation. Although it's purpose is described in the bills subtitle as such:
"To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes."it would actually act as a huge infringement on First Amendment rights as it is applied to the world wide web (a kind of wonky explanation, as well as links to memoranda from two leading legal scholars on the First Amendment, can be found here). The simplest argument against the legislation is that is unconstitutional because it is both overbroad and too vague; annddd you can get a taste of it on the above tagline with the uber-ominous and open-ended "[...] and for other purposes." Laws must be of a certain specificity and limited in scope so people on both sides of the law, those who are to comply with it and those that are too enforce it, know what exactly they are supposed to do and without empowering the government to enact a sweeping agenda. It is why we don't have laws saying simply "Don't do bad things," and almost every law is replete with definitions of terms in the beginning. Secondly, the bill cedes some enforcement capability to actual copy-right holders (let that sink it. Crazy right?). From the above linked article:
Coupled with this overbroad scope, the bills authorize remedies that lack the usual procedural safeguards, ensuring that even more protected, non-infringing speech will be restricted. Even though a judicial determination is generally required to remove speech from circulation, the House version empowers copyright-holders to send notices to payment processors and advertisers to shut off funding for non-infringing sites that meet the bill's broad definitions. The bills also encourage over-enforcement by making companies immune from suit for mistakenly punishing sites outside even the bills' over-expansive scope.This is unequivocal nutbaggery. The bill essential says that a copyright-holder can have funding shut off. This cannot be used for nefarious purposes? An uninterested party should not hold this role whether it be a judge or an independent body?
The technocracy of the U.S. immediately responded by speaking out against the bill. We are talking Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Zynga, Mozilla... essentially everyone except GoDaddy and their eccentric (putting it kindly) CEO. After coming under attack from the social news website Reddit, where a broad GoDaddy protest thread led to a proposed boycott of GoDaddy. The site eventually folded to the increasing pressure and announced that it no longer supported SOPA, as well as the Senatorial version in the Protect IP act.
Inside of Congress, however, support still seems strong and there is a decent chance that a version of this disastrous act gets passed. If any of you (6 friends of mine) feel strongly against this as well, please contact your local representative in Congress and your state Senators and tell them to vote no to both SOPA and Protect IP or they lose your vote. The only thing they will strongly react to, aside from the threat of losing money from big business, is losing their position as an elected official.
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