Great post. Well what do you want? This guy is another one of those phony baloney republicans. He signed up with Grover Norquist. That speaks for itself. These people would have you believe that this "is for your own good". 

Vote em' out of office and solve the problem!

Chasbo, this has nothing to do per se with political party.... my problems with the proposed legislation have to do a great deal more with process and results.

My appeal was to put this beyond partisan considerations. For us as well as the legislators.

There are an equal if not greater number of self-interested politicians among the Democrats, Dixiecrats, Tea Party and Independents.

The election funding process is at fault for that as well as the 2 year terms in the House of Reresentatives putting those people in the constant get funding mode and making them even more subject to financial pressures.

Vilification of one party is totally unfair. Both parties have the responsibility to make government work and have abrogated that. Who did what and when finger pointing will get us nowhere.

The issue in this post is SOPA and its shortcomings.

Let's all be models for our lawmakers and keep this discussion on a higher plane than political parties.

I'll half-agree with you there, except that our dysfunctional party system is a root cause of both the campaign finance problems you noted and the relative ease with which the MPAA/RIAA crowd have captured overwhelming support from both parties in Congress and from presidents of both parties.

When you talk about wanting to argue public policy "on a higher plane," you are hearkening back to one of the greatest flaws in our original Constitution--the fact that it says nothing about parties. The framers were in denial about two very important problems. One, slavery, we've mostly worked out with changes in law and culture. The late-18th fears about "the evils of faction" are still with us, as exemplified by your wording.

We don't need to deny the role of parties in forming this or any other policy. What we need is a structural change that enables us to have a functional multi-party system instead of an unintended duopoly that facilitates the worst aspects of our interest group system. That duopoly also leads to vast swathes of brainless chest-thumping speech from people whose party identification is less sophisticated than their devotion to their favorite professional sport teams.

That rather extensive quibble aside, I heartily support any and all efforts to stop SOPA and it's Senate cousin. I don't even need to get into critiquing the DMCA, which is an appalling example of special interest success at the expense of ordinary citizens. You hit a structural nail on the head when you typed about the bill's apparent intent to force some major Internet-based corporations to take on police roles. 

All about the large companies who rely on IP to control their markets trying to gain it back. Instead of embracing new technology they wish to restrict it, keep to their out dated business models and bleed the consumer for maximum profit.

Notice that Apple and Microsoft are not fighting SOPA...

Morons are still morons regardless of the party system, it's a lost cause expecting society to be intelligent...

Ah, the soothing tones of a a reliable psychoak trope. Reassurances of your continuity aside, did you actually have an opinion on the SOPA bill? If you, me, and the Doc all agreed that it needed stopping, I'd have some hope that it might actually fail. 

Then again, if you agree with Doc & me & the bill ends up as law, maybe I'll have to join the crowd who've declared that the republic is dead and we need to get busy writing a new constitution.  

Oh, I'm sure it will pass, and it sure as hell shouldn't.  That should have been a forgone conclusion though, considering how often I've railed against the absurdly stupid, entirely misdirected war on piracy, and regulation in general.  Although, considering past excursions into copyright insanity, this one is a good deal more sane.  It's at least putting the screws to other companies instead of giving companies the legal right to shaft their customers up the ass with a post sale contract rewrite...

But hey, what's yet another fairly minor little clog in the economy really going to matter?  A trillion here, a trillion there, the billions this one will cost the world economy are peanuts really...

The goose is well and truly cooked regardless of whether or not this idiocy passes.  Short of evil, draconian repeals of nearly every regulation we've gotten ourselves into over the last century, we'll be boned in the end.  The Dems will start screaming about genocide and what not before they even get started, and the republicans themselves aren't interested in getting rid of more than a small fraction of it, mostly with purely political reasons as they themselves are also too stupid to understand the basic principles of a market economy.

A related link:

http://wh.gov/DfY

Well, the DMCA was not actually needed, since the old Copyright law included digital in its language. Perhaps an extension to it, but not a complete rewrite.

This stuff, combined with broadband caps, is really going to hurt online businesses, such as Stardock.

So, will it get passed or not?

I'm really hoping it is not going to get through.

I haven't read any estimated vote counts for the final versions of the bills, but the tone of discussion about the markup in the House and the upcoming procedural floor vote in the Senate make it sound like some version will pass early next year.

But this is a tricky one because there are big-money players on both sides of the argument. Google and Facebook vs. Big Media and drugmakers--maybe if someone chopped just the counterfeiting stuff out we could get that passed and stop this SOPA/Protect IP approach.

We do not have to descend into "this party versus that party", but SOPA is indeed very political.  The force behind it is the same one that led Obama to bail out the banks (and Bush before him) - preservation of the status quo.  It helps established businesses, but inhibits new ones.  And new ones do not have billions to spend on campaign contributions.

SOPA is bad legislation period.  But I was amused by the story today on ZDNET stating that some of the worst offenders of copyright infringement are (drum roll) - RIAA and DHS!  Yes, the cops are the crooks.  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/everybody-pirates-riaa-homeland-security-caught-downloading-torrents/65670?tag=nl.e539

Update:

How SOPA could break the Internet:  http://www.extremetech.com/computing/109533-how-sopa-could-actually-break-the-internet

No disrespect, but the byte-centered media outlets might not be the only folks to read on the subject, especially because they have a vested interest in appearing to have a thorough understanding of systems that are far too complex for anyone to discuss accurately using plain English.

I recommend mixing in articles like this one at Politico.com http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70554.html . My main complaint with that piece is that it also offers no respectable info on how likely SOPA/Protect IP is to pass soon in some form.