There's an opinion piece
here from the Washington Post about the first day of judiciary committee hearings on the
Stop Online Piracy Act ("
SOPA").
The gist:
Quote:
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If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing used the phrase “I’m not a nerd” or “I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .,” I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.”
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Bills like SOPA are what happens when policy makers forget (or don't care) that copyright was always intended as a careful balance between the rights of the public and the rights of content creators.