SOPA will end liberty, not piracy

Google on the dangers of SOPA and PIPA:

The U.S. government could order the blocking of sites using methods similar to those employed by China. Among other things, search engines could be forced to delete entire websites from their search results. That’s why 41 human rights organizations and 110 prominent law professors have expressed grave concerns about the bills.

Many have attempted to defend the bills by arguing that piracy kills American jobs, and that the new legislation may help prevent those jobs from being lost. Google counters:

Law-abiding U.S. internet companies would have to monitor everything users link to or upload or face the risk of time-consuming litigation. That’s why AOL, EBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga wrote a letter to Congress saying these bills “pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job-creation.” It’s also why 55 of America’s most successful venture capitalists expressed concern that PIPA “would stifle investment in Internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness”. More than 204 entrepreneurs told Congress that PIPA and SOPA would “hurt economic growth and chill innovation”.

You may have noticed that Wikipedia is down today in protest; others are, too, including Boing Boing and reddit (McSweeneys.net has the best blackout page, in my opinion). Although this is an encouraging sign of solidarity, I very much doubt that the people who drafted the bill, being notorious for their tech illiteracy, will be greatly burdened. In any case — for all we mock it — Wikipedia does serve as a useful source of information (depending on your purposes). Thus, the blackout is becoming slightly more annoying than I had imagined.