Don’t pick up the SOPA

I won’t be joining today’s protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), since a quick glance of my site traffic reveals that nobody would notice if I did. It’s a two-edged sword, running an unread blog: You are completely free of responsibility, but you are also completely without influence. Ah, well. At least nobody’s trying to censor it.

Back to SOPA. Since I’ve made it a personal rule never to read any actual legislation, I have only a limited grasp of what the bill says. I do know that anything enthusiastically supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Motion Picture Association of America, and former Sen. Chris Dodd is probably nefarious. Dodd, who is making even more money as an industry lobbyist than he did as a senator — without the inconvenience of ethics charges — is trying to make SOPA sound like the New Deal. It’s all about protecting American jobs and innovation, he says.

If you believe that, you should remember that in America, corporations are people. People with jobs. And the job of all corporations is to make as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time. That is the one job Chris Dodd and the MPAA are fighting so hard to protect. It’s a job so important to them that the possibility of unwarranted censorship, and unchecked litigation against the little people, seems like an excellent idea.