SOPA... NOT good!

So Congress is looking at the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).

There's heavy lobbying on both sides. On the "For" side: the RIAA and MPAA (not surprisingly), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and on the "against" side: Amazon, Google, eBay and Yahoo.

According to the linked article:

SOPA is designed to respond to the rise of offshore Web sites, sometimes called "rogue" Web sites, that distribute pirated movies, songs, and other copyrighted material. It allows the attorney general to seek a court order against the targeted Web site that would, in turn, be served on Internet providers in an effort to make the target virtually disappear.

To me, this is akin to forcing everyone to go through an internet proxy which will filter out sites considered objectionable. At work this is the case, but the filtering there makes sense since it's intended to prioritize official duties.

But imagine logging on one day and finding that you can't access YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Photobucket, Flickr, LJ, etc. etc. etc. for the simple reason that there's pirated, or allegedly pirated, material there. Oh, and don't even THINK about torrenting. Those sites would be the first to go under this act.

All in the name of stopping piracy, civil liberties be damned. Didn't we do something similar several years ago? IIRC, it was called the Patriot Act.

The intentions may have been noble, but this has so much potential for abuse that we might as well rewrite our Constitution to get rid of the first ten amendments. :P

(Oh, and FWIW... I think the RIAA and MPAA members are entitled to make a living... but I draw the line where they start to make a killing.)