The Center for American Progress provided a forum earlier this week for the MPAA to spend an hour promoting SOPA.

Former Senator Chris Dodd demonstrates in these comments that he either does not understand the objections to SOPA or that he prefers engaging oversimplifications of his opponents arguments to directly addressing our legitimate concerns. He does a great job here of directly supporting the mechanisms of SOPA in the language of his prepared statements while simultaneously claiming that he is unable to address questions about those mechanisms due to his status as a former Senator.

Ars put it this way:

Comparisons between SOPA and censorship in repressive regimes enrage MPAA chairman, and former Senator, Chris Dodd. Speaking at the Center for American Progress on Tuesday, he called such comparisons "absolutely reprehensible." Dodd cited a recent op-ed by famed First Amendment advocate (and frequent Hollywood lawyer) Floyd Abrams, who said that such comparisons "trivialize the pain inflicted by actual censorship that occurs in repressive states throughout the world."

Abrams' essay glosses over the very complicated and controversial interface between freedom of speech and copyright issues involved in sampling, criticism and scientific use, and other fair use questions, which often factor into these takedowns. However, Ars takes a different tact that is more directly relevant to SOPA:

Dodd and Abrams seem to be attacking a straw man. No one claims that the blacklisting scheme envisioned by SOPA would be as bad as the the political censorship in force in China or Iran. But the proposal does use many of the same means—blacklists, intermediary liability, technology bans—as are employed in repressive regimes. If the US government adopted these techniques in the United States, it would obviously weaken its credibility to criticize other governments when they use the same means to pursue what everyone agrees are more reprehensible ends.

As I've stated elsewhere I think the problem is actually much more serious than that. SOPA obviously does not create a political censorship regime in the United States. It creates the technical infrastructure for political censorship, and sets the stage, so that when that sort of censorship is desired, creating it is merely a matter of flipping a switch.

Eventually, in the midst of some crisis, we'll see this infrastructure used in a manner that is unconstitutional, and baring a preliminary injunction, that unconstitutional ban will remain in place for years pending resolution in the courts. The only way to prevent unconstitutional use of the sort of censorship infrastructure that SOPA would create, is to avoid creating that infrastructure in the first place.

A country that truly values the free exchange of ideas can develop ways to enforce intellectual property laws without creating an infrastructure that will inevitably be used for political censorship.