These bills would go so far to protect copyright that they would strangle the Internet with regulation. The Web would be transformed from a permissive technology where innovation is welcome to one where websites are shut down first, questions asked later.

Hollywood is playing to stereotype, hoping to suppress technology as it did in 1982, when the late industry lobbyist Jack Valenti said the invention of the VCR was to the "American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler was to the woman home alone." Hollywood has since also fought DVD players, DVRs and MP3 players.

Technology makes many things possible, good and bad. One thing that seems a mission impossible is having laws keep up with the pace of change on the Internet. Hollywood's effort to create a different story line for the future of the Web is a horror show. Lawmakers should walk out.

The costs of our broken patent system are often abstract, but this month Google put a price tag on the problem: $12.5 billion. That's what Google paid for Motorola's U.S. smartphone business and its 17,000 patents. This is $12.5 billion that one of America's most creative companies will not use to innovate, fund research or hire anyone beside patent lawyers.

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The value of patents in software and hardware such as smartphones has everything to do with litigation risk. It has almost nothing to do with technology.

But all uses of technology are not equally virtuous. Enthusiasm for technology should not lead to a moral and political relativism that confuses crime with free speech and the British police with authoritarian governments.

And the world did not end when police did indeed temporarily shut down social media. This happened last week in San Francisco, Calif., one of America's most liberal cities.

Permitting peaceful protests while stopping violence seems like a reasonable compromise.

Robert Andrews, a reporter for the paidcontent:UK website, asked Twitter users whether they would prefer to keep the service available so they could chat about the television music competition "The X Factor" or let the service be closed temporarily "so that fellow citizens like shopkeepers need not be assaulted, have their property and premises pilfered and trashed, and so that they need not live in fear."

Though it was an admittedly unscientific survey, Mr. Andrews nevertheless reports that every Twitter respondent opted for "The X Factor." He concludes: "So addicted are we to our electronic connections, we simply cannot bear to be parted, for even an hour or two, in the name of public safety while London burns."

Techno-utopians would like to believe that digital technology is always a force for good, but technology can also accelerate evil. As Thomas Hobbes would say, without the enforcement of rules for ordered liberty, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," both in the real world and online.