Monday, December 19, 2011

Nerd Analysis: Law Profs on SOPA

Here's a follow-up to my previous post about SOPA.  Law prof Instapundit links to this Stanford Law Review paper by three other law professors.  Here's a bit of it:
Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression. 
To begin with, the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure ...
It goes on from there.  Read the whole thing.  The SOPA mess is basically saying, "hey, let's cure the disease by killing the patient."  Part of the problem is that the Congresscritters behind SOPA and Protect IP apparently have absolutely no freaking idea how the Internet works.  Oh, and read this .... and this ... and this.  If you really want to combat piracy, then make better streaming services for legitimate access, DUH.

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