Something that BOTH Conservative and Liberal bloggers can agree on, SOPA must be stopped now!

Courtesy of Politico:

The conservative and liberal blogospheres are unifying behind opposition to Congress’s Stop Online Piracy Act, with right-leaning bloggers arguing their very existence could be wiped out if the anti-piracy bill passes. 

“If either the U.S. Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) & the U.S. House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) become law, political blogs such as Red Mass Group [conservative] & Blue Mass Group [liberal] will cease to exist,” wrote a blogger at Red Mass Group. 

Some have asserted that the controversial measures would criminalize pages and blogs that link to foreign websites dedicated to online piracy. In particular, this has concerned search engines like Google, which could face massive liability if some form of the bill passes, some say. 

“Of course, restrictions of results provided by Internet search engines amount to just that: prior restraint of their free expression of future results. Google and others, under SOPA, are told what they can or can’t publish before they publish it. Kill. The. Bill,” conservative blogger Neil Stevens argued at RedState. 

Liberals had their own spin on it, cheering on the fact that corporate support for SOPA was starting to subside. 

In particular, GoDaddy, a domain registration firm, suffered a spectacularly bad round of PR when it came out in support of the measures. But after a grass-roots campaign to boycott the firm, driven by Reddit, an online community, and others, GoDaddy reversed course and renounced its support. 

“Some good news on the SOPA front: Its corporate base of supporters is starting to crumble,” David Dayden wrote at Firedoglake. “GoDaddy is not alone. Scores of law firms are requesting their names be removed from the Judiciary Committee’s official list of SOPA supporters.

” In the blogosphere, the trajectory of the bill seemed set — that it is destined for failure if the pressure of the online community is kept up. 

This may be one of the most important issues facing those of us who love the internet, and rely on its ability to disseminate information freely.  If this law passes I would not even be able to cut and paste this article to share it with you. Even though I have little doubt that the author, Tim Mak, would like as many people as possible to read it.

It would most likely force small blogs, like this one, to shut down, and even make those with a larger internet presence, such as Google dramatically reduce how much information they made available.

The Reddit community has really taken point in this matter and is now encouraging its vast number of "Redditors" to target individual House members who support the controversial bill:

"Let's pick ONE Senator [who] voted for NDAA/SOPA and destroy him like we're doing for GoDaddy," Reddit user digitalboy wrote yesterday. "Relentlessly investigate and find skeletons in his closet, money bomb is opponents, etc."

My gut feeling is that this bill will die well before it comes even close to becoming a danger to free internet speech.  However I will continue to pay close attention to SOPA until I know that it has breathed its last, and also keep my eye out for any similar bills which threaten our ability to freely exercise our First Amendment rights.