SOPA Blackout Day (today)

There's a thought.

Obviously I'm not participating, although I support the goals of the blackout. However I think it's important to point out the stupidity of the Stop Online Piracy Act.  On a day where everyone is going black, it might be a good day to point out why everyone is doing it.

Let's start with the obvious - it's Democrats proposing the legislation so it has to be wrong;

The authors of controversial piracy legislation are dismissing website blackouts planned for Wednesday as a “publicity stunt” designed to “stoke fear” among the public. Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit, Wordpress and some 7,000 other websites are vowing to go dark Wednesday to protest Rep. Lamar Smith’s Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and Sen. Patrick Leahy’s PROTECT IP Act in the Senate.

It's going to be more effective at censoring free speech than it is at stopping piracy.

SOPA gives individuals and corporations unprecedented power to silence speech online. Under SOPA, individuals and corporations could send a notice to a site’s payment partners, requiring those partners to cut the site off – even if the site could never be held liable for infringement in a U.S. court. Since many sites depend on this revenue to cover operational costs, even one accusation of infringement could be ruinous.

SOPA gives the government even more power to censor. The Attorney General can “disappear” websites by creating a blacklist and requiring service providers (such as search engines and domain services) to block the sites on the list.

SOPA uses vague language that is sure to be abused. The bill targets nearly any site that hosts user-generated content, or even just has a search function, by failing to provide protections for legal speech.

How does it sound now?  After the lights come back on, how about adding your voice to the protest agains more intrusive government?