SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and its senate cousin PIPA have their roots in a real problem: protection of copyright-holders intellectual property. but until recently i wasn’t sure how i felt about the bills. the debate seemed like the typical battle between the technically naive legislators and the knee-jerk libertarians who’d like everything to be “free” (as in speech, but preferably as in beer also). i couldn’t tell whether there was much meat to it.

but after reading a lot and watching a spirited debate between 2 intelligent stakeholders on tv (alex whatshisname from reddit and some corporate bigwig from NBC, look it up on youtube), i’m sure this is a really bad idea. in addition to the basic concerns about censorship (when has that EVER worked out well for us?) and first amendment issues, and the obvious technical problems, there are some other less well-known issues:

• a lot of people care about this bill, but most of them can’t even agree on what it actually says, in the literal sense. that can’t be a sign of good draftsmanship. the NBC guy kept saying “it only applies to foreign websites whose primary purpose is piracy” and the reddit guy kept saying “no it doesn’t”. yes it does. no it doesn’t. and like that.
• it puts the burden of copyright protection on the middle men. this tactic is born from frustration that we can’t control the providers if they’re outside our jurisdiction, and the consumers are small fish who are hard to catch and not politically expedient to prosecute. so who’s left? the middle men.
• like most legislation regarding technology, it’s hopelessly naive, and doomed to immediate obsolescence. what, DNS blocking is hard, and breaks DNSSEC? and it won’t work anyway? oops.
• the provisions regarding circumvention technology are very broad, and  the restrictions on content describing this tehcnology apply to domestic as well as foreign sites. circumvention technology could be taken to include all kinds of proxies, encryption, VPNs — things that have other legitimate and important uses.
• the limitation of liability for those who voluntarily block suspected wrongdoers is really insidious. the MPAA (or other copyright holder) can publish a blacklist of sites they consider to be pirates without any due process or judicial oversight.  if i’m a service provider and i don’t “voluntarily” block the sites on the blacklist, i open myself up to later charges that i didn’t take adequate measures if they turn out to be actual bad guys. so although officially getting a foreign site blocked requires a court order, unofficially the service providers can only protect themselves by taking the copyright-holders’ word for who’s a bad guy. the EFF calls this the “vigilante provision“.

scary.