geekosystem

Now don't get me wrong, there are awful, awful aspects to both SOPA and PIPA. The prospect of DNS blocking is egregious censorship. The prospect of cutting off funds and ad revenue to "infringers" without due process is egregious. Even without those provisions, though, we still don't need or want SOPA or PIPA. Why? Because we already have dangerously broken copyright law: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I understand that everyone is protective of material to which they hold the copyright. I understand that it's important that they have control over it, but some recent shenanigans involving Warner Bros. have shown, yet again, the fissures in a system that errs on the side of taking things down at a moment's notice. It seems that Warner Bros. has fessed up to filing all kinds of takedown requests at HotFiles regarding material they had no kind of actual copyright claim to, including some open source software.