SOPA Is The Problem And Not The Solution.
SOPA Bill is trying to prevent intellectual property piracy which is a legitimate goal, but the way it is going about it will break the Internet and may cause economic calamity.
At its core SOPA unwillingly recruits Internet industry companies like social networks, ISP's and search engines to become policing agents and legally liable for it's users content. Forcing social media sites and ISP's responsible for users content is amazingly burdensome and costly. SOPA will create economic problems for Internet start-ups which will be an additional negative side effect. This may cause a slow down in the Internet economic sector, which is providing real jobs and innovation for the US economy.
DMCA may not be perfect but it does allow for copyrite owners to police it's intellectual property to be removed from web sites by bad actors or zealous fans. Thus removing the legal liability from the search engine or ISP that points to or hosts this content. Yes I understand that this is difficult to manage with overseas web sites, but SOPA as it is written causes more problems then solves.
Moreover, what is most shocking, is SOPA's idea of giving judges determination of Internet DNS. The bill suggests DNS administrators remove bad actor domains on judges orders; thus breaking the fundamentals of the Internet. It is a disastrous precedent to have Congress legislate Internet DNS control.
Placing search engines and ISP's in the middle of policing for piracy is plain and simply a bad and confused attempt by well meaning people that fundamentally don't understand how the the Internet works.
The SOPA bills secondary title is "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.", which is interesting because it almost reverses everything it attempts to do by it's methods of enforcement. I don't support SOPA and I believe we all need to call and write our Congress to help them know we want a No vote on SOPA.
Other Links Worth Reading:
- The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas -
- Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works
- Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works
- SOPA Bill Text H. R. 3261
- http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/C?c112:./temp/~c1122OD38MStop Online Piracy Acthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
