I think I found a way to explain to my anti-Obama conservative friends how bad SOPA is while explaining to my Tech friends in a tizzy over SOPA how bad Obamacare is:
SOPA is the Obamacare of the technology and media industries
With one nefarious difference – SOPA is (ugg) bipartisan special interest legislation. With SOPA, you have conservative Republican Congressman Lamar Smith joining with liberal Democrat Senator Pat Leahy (Protect IP bill) and assorted other Congress-critters to do the bidding of Big Media (represented in DC by RIAA) with a bill to clamp down on ‘pirates’ in a blunderbuss, over-the-top, over-regulatory manner.
The SOPA/ProtectIP bills, the sponsors claim, will fight ‘piracy’, but they are restricting freedom, innovation and consumer choice. In recent news, Lamar Smith removes DNS blocking from SOPA, but it is a small victory, not a real fix of the underlying problem. The problem is this bill has a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ manner allowing the blacklisting of whole sites based on infringements from user-provided content. It directly assaults the ‘pro-sumer’ user-generated-content social networking communities that have built up in 10 years. As commneter in the above article notes:
They are well-intentioned. They want to prevent piracy and copyright infringement. But they do so in an overly-aggressive, innovation-endangering way. They allow the entertainment industry to censor sites they feel “engage in, enable or facilitate” infringement.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes SOPA as the “blacklist bill” because it would “allow the U.S. government and private corporations to create a blacklist of censored websites, and cut many more off from their ad networks and payment providers.”
These concerns are creating a firestorm of opposition from both the left and the right – on the right Redstate has promised to ‘primary’ SOPA supporters with conservative opponents.
Obamacare is likewise rife with massive dangerous unintended consequences that stifles both innovation, freedom, and choice. Alas, there wasn’t a twitter campaign to “STOP OBAMACARE”, but it is gratifying that this particular effort to defend freedom and choice is making an impact and is being felt.
STOP SOPA now … defeat Obamacare later (by defeating Obama in November). Doing both will be good for freedom.