I remember my father, a retired physician, railing against government attempting to legislate on medical matters, an area in which they demonstrated little to no understanding.  I didn’t have a full appreciation for the sort of legislative blunders congress was truly capable of until SOPA and PIPA.

In short, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, congress) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA, senate) bills try to placate the Big Media industry, which claims that Piracy is rampant and causing significant financial harm to the industry.  This claim, particularly that piracy is causing great financial harm to the music and movie industries is credibly disputed, however.  I won’t bombard you with links on the matter, except to point you to eff.org for a good place to start.

However, not only is the goal of SOPA (and PIPA) possibly misguided, but the means for enforcing the controls on online piracy are incredibly irresponsible.  This is not to say that congress is acting out of ill will, collusion or self-interest (necessarily), but at the very least out of an abundance of ignorance.  Why?  What harm do these bills pose?

Tampering with How the Internet Works

These bills attempt to legislate how the Internet works.  Last I heard, the brilliant minds who crafted and refined the Internet over years are not working as congressmen.  What the geniuses in D.C. have decided in their rampant technological naiveté amounts to surgery on the Internet with a spoon.  These laws would require service providers (you’re likely familiar with Comcast or Verizon) to block offending sites from being listed in the global name registry called DNS.  This would be something like having your business removed from the Yellow Pages (back when people actually used the YPs).  Worse, like other egregious examples of technical legislation like the DMCA, there is little or no due process when complaints are filed.  Basically, you’re guilty until proven innocent.  It’s a little hard to grasp based on these abstract descriptions, but take the example of Youtube.  If some copyright holder files a complaint that someone has posted their copyrighted material, the resulting actions effectively shut Youtube down for some period of time, until the matter could be resolved.  In Youtube’s case, it would simply be decimated, effectively never online.  Would this stop piracy?  No.  Would it stop a great deal of the Internet you’ve come to rely on from working?  YES!

Ignorance is Bliss

Probably the most worrying thing about the SOPA debacle is congress’ willingness to legislate out of willful ignorance.  In 1995, congress made the ill-advised move to dismantle the Office of Technology Assessment.  This is exactly the independent body that could have provided congress with the clear-headed and technically aware perspective needed to kill these bills before they saw the light of day.

Backlash

Now that these bills have made it so far through the legislative process, there has been a growing backlash among the tech community.  Wikipedia shut down most of the English version of their site (though you could still get the content if you knew where to find it), and Google and many many others either shutdown or modified their sites in protest of these bills.

Anybody with some knowledge of these matters knows that these bills are a bad idea.  As technically informed citizens, we must tell congress to put an end to ignorance-based legislation.