Pull the plug on SOPA/PIPA

Imagine a United States where the government possessed the authority to “remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the [court] order; or not serve a hypertext link to such Internet site.” Forcing search engines to remove links to an entire website because of a single infringing page is fraught with the potential of First Amendment violations. Additionally, copyright holders claiming infringement by a website could seek a court injunction against the DNS that would stymie all financial transactions and advertising.

The music and film industries survived the home-taping booms of past decades, and they likely will survive the digital piracy age without enacting the costly and dangerous provisions of SOPA/PIPA. Protecting copyrights and trademarks is indeed important, but the regulatory overreach of SOPA/PIPA requires rejection of both and a return to the legislative drawing board.

Bruce Edward Walker is the managing editor of The Heartland Institute’s InfoTech & Telecom News. You can email him at bwalker@heartland.org.