“Your problem is with the due process aspect.”

One of my problems is with the aspect that may allow a cite to be taken down before having the opportunity to an adversarial hearing. I have a few other problems, like the fact that potential infringement penalties exceed penalties for false takedown requests. That’s unacceptable, plaintiffs are in a better position to know if they hold protections over something than defendants.

“That’s a real stretch to fix that in a bill. “

We’re not talking about fixing FRCP in general, we’re talking about a bill (SOPA) that enables prior restraint before the opportunity of due process. We’re talking about fixing that bill so that the bill will not result in such a possibility.

“Everyone knows that the “break the internet” cries were so much hyperbole.”

Yes, simply proclaim your position to be true and due away with reason and logic.

“As George Ou has pointed out, it will not break the internet except for those sites adjudicated as rogue.”

George builds a strawman and shoots it down. As pointed out, SOPA could potentially cause other problems.

Allowing courts to remove sites before the possibility of an adversarial hearing itself can cause serious problems and hence ‘break the Internet’ or at least negatively reshape it.

Not providing sufficient disincentive for plaintiffs to file bogus takedown requests, through stricter penalties, encourages them to abuse SOPA to take down content for reasons other than infringement. That alone could cause serious problems. Penalties for bogus takedown requests should exceed penalties for infringement. But SOPA supporters refuse to allow for such a thing because they don’t plan to use these laws to stop infringement, they plan to use them to stop competition.

Bad laws are already responsible for breaking everything else. Copy protection laws are broken (they last too long, infringement damages are too high and exceed damages for falsely claiming content that one has no privileges to), they broke broadcasting (self interested corporate interests now have exclusive broadcasting and cableco monopoly privileges, they abuse those privileges to censor criticisms they don’t like. For instance, they would never allow Mike to criticize IP over public airwaves or on cable because they know that their position is indefensible in the face of scrutiny). Restaurants and other venues are deterred from hosting independent performers thanks to collection societies that threaten them with lawsuits if they refuse to pay a fee under the pretext that someone might infringe. As a result, outside the Internet, people almost must pay monopoly prices for almost all content. In addition to wrongfully denying me of my right to freely broadcast, the government wrongfully grants a monopoly on content (through copy protection laws) and on the distribution of that content (through broadcasting). The very intent is to deter the creation of permissibly licensed and public domain content. Look around you, everything outside the Internet is broke thanks to bad laws. and those who wanted those bad laws passed made similar arguments that you did. “FCC broadcasting monopolies won’t result in censoring free speech”. That turned out to be wrong. Now our government wrongfully grants monopoly power over almost everything (ie: taxi cab monopolies) and the public is mostly unaware thanks to the fact that the government has also granted monopolies to communication.

So it’s hardly a stretch to say that SOPA will cause huge problems and that it’s intended to. So many of our other laws are corrupt, this law looks corrupt (and some of the politicians pushing for it have received massive campaign contributions from those who want these laws), it’s hardly a stretch to say that this law is corrupt like all of the many other laws. Government doesn’t intend for this law to be socially beneficial, it intends for this law to be corrupt like all of the many other corrupt laws that exist. If government does care about the general public its first order of business would be to substantially repeal our existing copy protection laws by reducing infringement penalties, increasing the penalties for claiming something that one has no privileges to and for filing bogus takedown requests, making copy protection opt in and requiring a centralized database where works can get stored and referenced so that people can better know if something is infringing and so that content can later be released when it does enter the public domain (say, the LOC) for the public to enjoy, substantially shortening copy protection lengths, etc…

The only acceptable course of action congress can take right now is to substantially repeal copy protection laws. Expanding them and their enforcement is not acceptable and it’s not in the public interest.