Sopa why is it good

Its plot unfolded slowly, as though building tension to some kind of crisis point that never came, a well-timed tragedy for the blog equivalent of sweeps, the death of one of her cows, maybe. Or webisodes that suddenly stop being funny as soon as you persistently coerce any of your friends into watching them always, like magic. On the rare occasion when something noteworthy occurs, a natural disaster or a Blue Ivy Carter, the internet is even more stimulating than usual.

The internet may be the only place where humans communicate fearlessly: a dangerous and wild imagined space, with all sorts of beasts to gawk at. Suddenly, we have access to such a vast array of stuff, and so many tangents and interpretations of that stuff, that our experience of being human has changed. We leave fingerprints on what we find, the videos and images and words, and stuff them into our caches so we can find them more quickly if we need them. Planet Innovation Design Culture Cities.

The bill requires every payment or advertising network operator to set up a process through which outside parties can notify the company that one of its customers is an "Internet site is dedicated to theft of U. Filing false notifications is a crime, but the process would put the burden of proof -- and the legal cost of fighting a false allegation -- on the accused.

As the anti-SOPA trade group NetCoalition put it in their analysis of the bill: "The legislation systematically favors a copyright owner's intellectual property rights and strips the owners of accused websites of their rights. Who supports SOPA, and who's against it? In general, media companies have united in favor of them, while tech's big names are throwing their might into opposing them.

The bill's supporters dismiss accusations of censorship, saying that the legislation is meant to revamp a broken system that doesn't adequately prevent criminal behavior. But SOPA's critics say the bill's backers don't understand the Internet's architecture, and therefore don't appreciate the implications of the legislation they're considering. In November, tech behemoths including Google GOOG , Fortune and Facebook lodged a formal complaint letter to lawmakers, saying: "We support the bills' stated goals.

Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding U. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities [and] mandates that would require monitoring of web sites. Where does the bill stand now? SOPA was once expected to sail quickly through committee approval in the House.

But tech companies, who largely oppose the bills, mobilized their users to speak out. Google GOOG , Fortune drew more than 7 million signatures for a petition that it linked on its highly trafficked homepage. The bills lost some of their Congressional backers as a result of the backlash.

One major tenet of the original SOPA legislation has already been removed. As originally written, SOPA would have required Internet service providers ISPs to block access to sites that law enforcement officials deemed pirate sites.

But the White House said its analysis of the original legislation's technical provisions "suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity," and that it wouldn't support legislation that mandates manipulating the Internet's technical architecture.

What are the alternatives? One option, of course, is that Congress does nothing and leaves the current laws in place. Alternative legislation has also been proposed. Much worse. SOPA section offers legal immunity to ISPs that independently block websites that host illegally copied material without any prompting from the government. That's a major conflict of interest for a huge ISP like Comcast, which also owns NBC — there would be nothing stopping Comcast from blocking a foreign video service that competes with NBC if it could claim it had a "reasonable belief" it was "dedicated to the theft of US property.

Now, you may have noticed that while all these rules are totally insane, they're all at least theoretically restricted to foreign sites — defined by SOPA as sites with servers located outside the US.

That's important to know: at its simplest level, SOPA is a kneejerk reaction to the fundamental nature of the internet, which was explicitly designed to ignore outmoded and inconvenient concepts like the continuing existence of the United States.

Because US copyright holders generally can't drag a foreign web site into US courts to get them to stop stealing and distributing their work, SOPA allows them to go after the ISPs, ad networks, and payment processors that are in the United States. It is a law borne of the blind logic of revenge: the movie studios can't punish the real pirates, so they are attacking the network instead.

SOPA's proponents argue that the bill will protect US citizens and corporations from the ongoing theft of property outside our borders; that the law is narrowly tailored to only punish those who profit from illegal content.

Indeed, it's possible the notice-and-takedown system for payment providers could potentially resist abuse: unlike YouTube's reflexive takedowns, it's hard to see a credit card processor turning off a paying account just because it gets an angry letter in the mail.

But that's just one piece of the puzzle, and the deep concerns about tinkering with the DNS system have never been adequately addressed by any of SOPA's sponsors or supporters. Last week saw a flurry of activity around SOPA as the House Judiciary Committee opened "markup" hearings, during which amendments are debated and the committee votes whether to bring the bill to the full House of Representatives.

Lamar Smith R-Texas would breeze through the markup process and hold an easy vote, but SOPA opponents demanded that the committee first bring in technical experts to testify about the impact of the law on the internet — the committee has only heard from content industry representatives until now. The hearings lasted for nearly 12 hours on Thursday and for several more on Friday until they were abruptly adjourned, with Smith promising that they would re-open as soon as possible.