each of which lay out their objections quite nicely. I understand all the terminology and how it's being used, I've been building PCs for over 15 years now, I was first online when NCSA Mosaic was "the thing"- please trust me when I say SOPA is a really, really bad law.
Let me put this into a context even Checkers could understand.
If SOPA had been in place during DU's dispute with Righthaven (or, more properly put, Righthaven's illegitimate dispute with DU), DU would have been:
* Gone for most members, "most" being those who don't know the DU IP address that resolves to democraticunderground.com
* Slow to respond, due to using an offshore nameserver
* Devoid of current content (see points #1 and #2)
This is because DU would have been put on "teh list" (sic) during the court case, blocked in the nameserver system your (and everyone else's) ISP uses to resolve addresses. Furthermore, those Google ads would have gone away completely, eliminating DU's revenue stream from that (under SOPA, IIRC, Google would have been forbidden from doing business with DU).
Given the above facts (as I understand SOPA), do you think DU would have still been around even though we won against Righthaven? I seriously doubt it. I think, had SOPA been in place as of even so little as a single year ago, there wouldn't be a DU anymore because of what Righthaven pulled.
I think malicious copyright claims against small-to-medium sized website operators is the purpose of SOPA. There are simply too many repressive aspects of this law (and other, similar laws) for it to be anything but that. Having said that, the phrase "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence" might spring to mind. I would respond, "never excuse by incompetence that which can be better explained by greed". The supporters of this law are some of the same people who would scream infringement of Snow White when they're seeing an essay titled "Snow White".
To fully understand SOPA and why it is such a bad idea, you really need an understanding of the technical terms, what they mean, and how they're applied and used. The writers and backers of this bill are counting on it all being too technical for the layperson to grok. My strong advice to you and everyone else asking the questions you have is to try to understand those terms.
The internet as you know it really is hanging in the balance, here, and I'm being serious as a heart attack when I say it that way.
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