Update: November 12: The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a markup Nov. 18 on S. 3804, Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. Remember to contact your representatives to let them know your opinion on the proposed bill. To find out who are the senators on your state and their contact information, you can visit Senators of the 111th Congress . More info here: Tell Your Senator: No Website Blacklists, No Internet Censorship! and here: Stop the Internet Blacklist!
I'd think there are some things I'd like to have eliminated on the net like child pornography. So there is a need to have the net policed so that child predators, to name another, can't exploit the children who are always on it.
EDIT: Per post 5, I officially recant this argument. The text of the bill is here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-3804 I see no troubling censorship, and there is no blacklist. There is a list mentioned--of sites that are primarily engaged in infringing on others' intellectual property rights, but the list is a list of websites that the Attorney General is not taking action against (but which the AG thinks it *could* take action against if he wanted to). There is also a provision for challenging being on the list and having your site removed from it. The main part of the bill says that if a website is dedicated to infringing activities, the AG can go to court and get a court order saying :stop that." That is pretty uncontroversial. The AG also is required to keep a list of infringing sites publicly available (again, for sites where the AG is not seeking a court order). There is nothing about blocking them or prohibiting others from accessing them on the web. It seems like another case of "Let your Senator know that you want to preserve the right to steal!"
The whole IP paradigm is changing and most shows are free to air or free to watch anyway. Not that it matters. It's already against the Law. We don't need a new set of laws. I don't want or need more government wasting time and tax money regulating my internet. But, you can let you Senator know you support the US government regulating your internet. Maybe if you're lucky, one day you won't be allowed to access Sciforums.com. Or maybe you'll have to pay. Actually, I can see it now. We'll have yet another "free" governmental agency to regulate the internet. They'll need to justify their budget and do a cost analysis OHHH and it's not fair that everyone pays, I mean, not everyone uses the Internet. So we'll need a tax on people who do use the internet. Better yet, let's just charge per site, as some people use it a little bit and anothers a lot. Yup, just a small little "Fee for Keeping us Safe from the Terrorists". Who really FN knows? People would have laughed in your face at the idea of paying for the Post, as at one time it was assumed a right. I would not be surprised at all if somehow another government agency morphed into another Institution and people 20 years from now think paying per page is "normal". USIoI, the US Institution of Internet: Keeping US Safe for 20 Years. Oh, by the Gods, can't let people just click for free. That's crazy ... and so unsafe and my gods people used to download old TV series they would have otherwised just skipped watching. Thank God Uncle Sam and the USIoI for keeping us safe. Anyway, what I see the thin edge of a wedge and I don't need it. As for Pedos. It's illegal! You don't need a new law. It is against the law! Geesh. As if these f*ck faces are going to stop because there's a new law on top of the millions already. Get real. Making a new Internet Law isn't going to stop that shit. You need to capture those fuckers and cut the god damn balls off and leave them to bleed out in the town square. For f8cked sake, we're so backwards Amazon was selling a "How To Groom Children" pedo manual! From my point of reference passing Laws to regulate society is mostly a waste of time and tax. You need people to use social pressure. As what happened with Amazon and those bastards took that shit down. In Japan most Japanese don't download, because (A) a lot of it is free on the Internet commercially and (B) a massive public education campaign about the need to support artists by seeing they are paid. And when that doesn't work they embed the ads into the media.
Actually, I have revised my opinion on the bill, and reversed my position as a result. What I missed was that the action is brought "in rem"—against the domain name itself, not the owner of that domain name. As a result, the owner of the domain name need not be contacted when legal action is initiated. Because the thing being sued is the domain name, not an actual person, the notice requirements are very different, and it is unlikely the domain name is going to show up in court to defend itself. It's therefore possible to shut down a website without any full and fair debate about whether the website is primarily engaged in the promotion of infringing activities, since the people running the site won't hear about the lawsuit until after the site is shut down. If the bill were ever used that way (and the Attorney General could choose to give proper notice in advance to the opposing party, rather than act unopposed), I can't imagine a court would allow it. While I have no sympathy for illegal file sharing, that is prior restraint without any ability to defend yourself until later on. In that sense it's like being able to shut down a newspaper before the newspaper can defend itself in court (by taking the action not against the publisher but against the printing press itself). It's almost not worth opposing the bill, because I don't see how the courts could possibly sustain it.
