Due to a court ruling the UK is more or less living with a SOPA style Internet filtering system. News today that it is, of course, blocking access to legitimate content: Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.
Contrast this actual reality with the following statement made by Chris Dodd during the SOPA debate: THR: How do you answer critics who say this legislation would be a threat to free speech online? Dodd: That’s the most offensive line of all... Illegal conduct is not protected by the First Amendment. The Internet is not a law-free zone. It doesn’t create exceptions for illegal activity. Stealing is wrong. The First Amendment doesn’t protect stealing. There’s nothing in this bill in any manner, shape or form that would deprive people of their First Amendment rights. You know the great H.L. Menken line: "When they tell you it's not about the money, it's about the money." So they bring up freedom of speech, break the Internet. But the fact of the matter is, it’s a huge revenue stream off of this.
He goes on to argue that the DMCA also has no consequences at all for freedom of speech! That was the same argument made 14 years ago when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was adopted. And it’s the same argument — the sky is falling. You only need to go back and take a cursory look to see what happened in the last 14 years, the advances and innovations in technology despite the claims in 1998 [of what would happen] if [Congress] passed that act. It did not break the Internet. It did not deprive anyone of freedom of speech at all. And it certainly did not curtail or stymie creative innovation in new technology.
This is what SOPA looks like. | 
