Apparently, it sounds like we are about to see a new spin.

Driving home from work, I was listening to a morning show discussing the latest news China hacks into US Chamber of Commerce

From the article:

For more than a year, hackers with ties to the Chinese military have been eavesdropping on U.S. Chamber of Commerce officials involved in Asia affairs, authorities say.

The hackers had access to everything in Chamber computers, including, potentially, the entire U.S. trade policy playbook.

The problem? (quoting more or less as I remember it – and I wasn’t totally clear if this was the opinion of the morning talk show, or of the USCOC) “Other countries censor some of the content they allow on the internet. We here in America just allow everything and anything onto the internet.”

This was followed up quickly with “America ranks near the bottom of countries for internet security”

See, the implication here is that it isn’t that the US Chamber of Commerce seems to have little understanding of how the internet works. It’s the fact we don’t censor enough.

This make SOPA all the more important. By censoring the internet just a little bit, we can actually make it MORE secure. (Who knows if they have the gall to really try spinning it that way, but I for one will not be the least surprised if when they reconvene they try to add some provision to make this seem like not just an “anti-piracy bill” but a “cybersecurity” bill as well).

On the domestic front it seems to me that should SOPA, Protect-IP, or some other similarly directed bill pass into law, its effect would be relative minor across the spectrum of startups in all sectors of our economy. Yes, some that are based in large measure upon business models that depend upon the use of the content of others would incur a somewhat larger, but inderterminate in scope, burden for compliance over and above all other legal burdens that currently pertain (and many of these burdens have nothing to do with content).

While I happen to subscribe, for the most part, to the view that “due process” and “censorship” are largely red herrings since to a large degree the processes outlined in the bills are generally in accord with longstanding principles of law as articulated in the Federal Rules of Civil/Criminal Procedure, it is by belief that these bills have a more fundamental underlying purpose, and it is not the dismantling of the DMCA (though I readily admit my belief that the DMCA could use a “tune up” to reflect just how much circumstances have changed since its enactment in 1998).

My view is that a significant impetus for the bills can be tied back to Universal v. Sony, and specifically the “staple article of commerce” test articulated in the decision by the court having incorporated a patent law doctrine into copyright law. The patent law doctrine was crafted to address a particular set of circustances that simply to not fit into copyright law.

Again, just my view, but one should not overlook Universal v. Sony in the discussion.