The House Judiciary Committee is currently holding hearings on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the latest incarnation of PIPA and other bills designed to combat piracy by allowing the blocking of sites suspected of copyright infringement.
This has led to an "explosion of opposition" in the words of the EFF, from groups as diverse as the tech community, intellectual property law professors, the ACLU, and groups from the International Human Rights Community.
On the eve of the House Judiciary Committee's hearing on the Stop Internet Piracy Act—where five witnesses will appear in favor of the bill to just one against—a broad group of tech companies, lawmakers, experts, professors, and rights groups have come out against the bill.
The statements, written by people from a variety of backgrounds and political persuasions, incorporate many of the same broad themes: SOPA will threaten perfectly legal websites, stifle innovation, kill jobs, and substantially disrupt the infrastructure of the Internet.
I know that there are some on this site that strongly support efforts to combat copyright infringements. But this legislation is not only the wrong way to combat the problem, it will take us into a future where big corporations have the right to censor sites at whim, leaving almost no recourse to small and independent web publishers.
On Techdirt, film producer Derek Parham sums up why the bill is so dangerous:
As a content owner I would have power to send a simple letter to a payment processor accusing a client of theirs of copyright infringement. If the payment processor doesn't cut off a business relationship with my target within five days, they could be dragged into a convoluted legal process. I don't need to consult with a lawyer to do this, which is great because I don't even have one. I certainly can send simple letters out in my free time between takes on the set though. This is too much power for a single movie producer to have and it's way too much for any one else to have. A large tech company could defend itself in court, but small startups don't stand a chance.
The fact that many tech companies are very small and overly susceptible to the impact a simple accusation could have under SOPA is lost on many folks...most of the large tech companies that exist today were once very small and very fragile. If SOPA was in place, those companies would have never grown up, since the two guys in a garage would have required four lawyers to survive.
Dropbox is a perfect example. Created by some college students, the company provides shared online storage space for a fee. Under SOPA, the company would have been cut off from its revenues as soon as a single accusation was made that it was hosting copyrighted material. As a small company this could have been crippling...The innovative tech companies of the future will be extinguished before they have a chance to even get out the door.
Organizations opposed to the bill have declared American Censorship Day, with several major websites such as Mozilla and Boing Boing devoting their front pages to help raise awareness of the danger this law poses.