Even Congress concedes that. I DO think the onus should be on sites to control what goes through their pipes, but also agree there should be a limit to that onus, one that stops well short of effectively disconnecting them if they happen to miss something. The appropriate response would be a process by which offending content would be removed, subject to independent oversight. Part of the problem here is that we already have a law very close to that (the main difference is the lack of independent oversight,) its inadequacy to the task motivated the pending legislation and the same people who are most critical of the pending legislation are highly critical of that inadequate laws "censorship."

It is hard to take critics of the pending legislation seriously when they argue the existing law that does not do enough actually does too much.

As with so much of government, the bottom line remains: Tell them what they SHOULD do instead of what they should NOT do.

Congress hasn't really conceded anything. Nothing has been changed, so far- SOPA was "delayed," which means "we were hoping to pass this without fuss, but now that people are actually paying attention, we're hoping you'll all forget about this pretty soon."

It's all well and good to say that "sites should be responsible for what is on their pages," but what SOPA means is that if I posted a picture of Batman wearing a funny hat, RAFO could be summarily blocked due to a copyright complaint.


And finally, with regard to your "doesn't do enough, does too much" comment: The point is that "pirates" and "hackers" (these shadowy figures that are being pointed to as a kind of monolithic Axis of Evil) wouldn't be slowed by SOPA in the slightest- there are pretty basic ways to access sites anyway. That's the "doesn't do enough" part.

The "does too much" part is that it sets in place infrastructure to monitor, control, and censor every aspect of the Internet. That was the point of my Denmark story- that even though it starts out saying "oh, we just want to stop this one thing," it becomes a tool that can be used for much more.