"Thinking aloud is a habit responsible for much of mankind's misery."

- "Benjamin Franklin" in HBO's John Adams

A prerequisite for free political discourse is that people feel like they can get up in the morning and throw some thoughts out on the public Internet on their way out the door to work and right or wrong the worst thing they might expect is a reply from someone who disagrees with them.

If we are to have intellectual property rights there must be a process for removing infringing content, but that process must be precisely applied and carefully limited, least it become a tool for over-broad acts of retaliation and censorship through intimidation.

If our legal system provides a mechanism for retaliation against disfavored opinions and our culture approves of its use, if people are made to feel that some day, when they least expect it, something they wrote on a personal blog might get them in real trouble, the whole public sphere will be diminished, and our democracy with it.