Comments on: We need a political litmus test for tech and SOPA isn’t it

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:10:27 +0000

Protect IP only applies to foreign sites. The law that affects American sites, DMCA, has been in effect for some time now.

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:07:40 +0000

The large fact remains that the scope of SOPA is foreign sites dedicated to infringing content. No US-hosted blog meets that description, and no blog anywhere that has a few stray links meets it either.

It’s not that your example is a subtle failure, it’s that it’s not even close to describing what SOPA actually does or who it applies to in its current form.

By: Stacey Higginbotham

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:23:04 +0000

In trying to make the provisions accesible to people who don’t understand the DNS system I said gone, as opposed to blocking the domain name and forcing people to use the actual IP address. And as a note, the blogs are being written by the parents. Children would use Tumblr I’m sure :)

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 06:12:56 +0000

I’m guessing that the blog scenario is in response to PROTECT IP Act, which (as the acronym says) deals with protecting intellectual property, and as a result will have ramifications with small users and user generated content.

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:22:55 +0000

Excuse me for being painfully factual, but there is no provision in SOPA for taking any little Susie’s or Johnny’s blog off-line.

SOPA is a bill that applies sanctions to offshore Internet sites that are dedicated to patent or copyright violations or that traffic in dangerous goods. The blogs of American children (if children were into such fuddy-duddy pursuits as blogging) don’t qualify on any of these counts.

You certainly can’t use SOPA as a litmus test if you don’t know what it actually does.