We stand against SOPA and Protect IP. Here’s why you should too.

In late November a truly unprecedented cadre of tech companies with the likes of Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Facebook, eBay, Twitter, the Wikimedia Foundation, Microsoft and many others came out in vocal opposition against H.R. 3261 – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Senate bill S.968 – Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (Protect-IP).

ThoughtMatrix is joining Silicon Valley tech leaders in opposing this legislation because provisions in these two bills will irrevocably damage the technically and civilly free internet as we know it, and potentially wipe out the fastest growing Silicon Valley job creators.

Without digging too deep, SOPA and PROTECT-IP sound like good ideas. Most people understand that online piracy should be discouraged because it may detrimentally impact the profit margin of content creators. But these ill-conceived bills take the implementation, enforcement and penalties into dangerous (and technically unfeasible) territories:

The bill would require the same DNS-blocking methods used in China and Iran. Corporations would be given the ability to block entire domains (not just user accounts) that are “capable of” or “seem to encourage” copyright infringement. So if a user uploads a video of themselves lip syncing a copyrighted song to YouTube, the entire YouTube.com domain could be taken offline.
Ordinary users could face felony charges for “streaming” a copyrighted song. The penalty is a 5 year sentence. As one tweet put it, “Under SOPA, you could get 5 years for uploading a Michael Jackson song, one year more than the doctor who killed him.”
The integrity and technical reliability of the worldwide DNS system would be jeopardized, since the U.S. DNS servers would have different records than their foreign counterparts.
Several provisions in the bills would stifle the innovations that Silicon Valley companies have become known for. Millions of tech jobs would be at risk, and the United States would lose its place as the leader in information technology innovation.
These bills have a high potential of becoming law, since they have significant co-sponsor support on both sides of the isle. The PROTECT-IP Act has 21 Democrats, 16 Republicans and 1 independent. SOPA has 7 Democrats and 16 Republicans co-sponsoring.

SOPA and PROTECT-IP are bills that industry lobbyists crafted. The entertainment industry has spent over $91 million on this issue, and they outspend Silicon Valley lobbying efforts by about 6 to 1. U.S Legislators have stacked the deck against the opposition by refusing requests from technically knowledgable industry players to testify against the bills. Even though the entertainment industry’s experts admit they are not qualified to speak on the technical aspects of the legislation, they insisted that their bills would not create any issues with the worldwide DNS system.

It’s time to act.

SOPA and PROTECT-IP will only be defeated if our Congress sees a groundswell of opposition from their constituents. It only takes a few minutes to take action: