Correct me if I am wrong, but does the government not already have that POWER and AUTHORITY? Are we not talking about legislation that simply expaning the basis on which both can be USED without violating US law? It certainly SOUNDS like the bills under consideration would just streamline the process whereby commerical entities can get government to take down a site for alleged copyright infringement. In terms of government abusing regulatory power, denying all access to sites with content it does not want people to see: It could do that now, yet there is little evidence it does, so I do not see why these bills would change that.</quote

no, currently the feds can only prosecute if the content -- actual CONTENT, not links -- are illegal by nature. the feds have *some* power to shut down websites which perform illegal activities as they should. making filesharing a crime instead of a civil matter is not the best use of our time and energy when there are far more important things to be solved first. the provisions in sopa/pipa would give the central DNS authority of the internet to the federal government, a power it does not currently have and should not ever get. not to mention that by giving the government this power, we would set back the work to make the internet more secure by years, if it could even be implemented once the DNS portion passes.



you're saying you want china's model for the internet in the US? the US internet is only able to bring down illegal operations on the internet, it cannot currently block websites at the DNS level. it should never have that power. if this part passes, we may as well just literally put the constitution through a shredder. "congress shall make no law..." and all that stuff.



how has the inherent operation of the internet changed from those modem days to now? the only thing it's done fundamentally different is shift from gopher/lynx to http and instituted an addressing scheme that will prevent us from running out of IP addresses. the protocols which control traffic flow have always been decentralized once the educational institutions started jumping on and the old DARPA project went into the public realm. but yet, even in those old days, the government did not have the power to just turn off access to any location it did not want anyone to see. the best you could do was to put a password and/or moderators in place to police the content.

at the heart of what is being proposed, this is the essential argument. the way it works now is that a content creator sends a cease and desist letter (via the DMCA provisions) to a site it believes is infringing their copyright. the site has a specified amount of time to respond, and must temporarily remove the content while the matter is investigated. the way the bill is written, it's up to the admin of each and every site on the internet to check every page they have for infringing links and remove them automatically whether they can be proven to be infringing or not. tell me why it's better to have every website owner in charge of policing someone else's copyright? the reason copyright exists is to give the content creator some means of legal control of their copyright. this bill allows the major studios to stop having to enforce their own copyright and force everyone else to do it for them. the reason it comes down to "make NO legislation" is because the current laws are already adequate and are already abused. why do we need to make something EASIER to abuse than the current system?