This article from Ars is an excellent summary of the problems with the political process that was used to craft and debate SOPA and PIPA, as well as various issues with the way the law approaches the problem.

Involve all stakeholders: By "involve all stakeholders," we don't mean what Washington usually means: put multiple behemoth corporations in a room to work out a deal.

The public has a serious stake in Internet issues and needs meaningful participation. Note: Google is not our champion or spokesperson, and it does not stand in for the public interest.

Open drafting: We need to work on principles in public, then move towards legislation, not introduce maximalist legislation and make small concessions.

Hold real hearings: the recent hearings on SOPA and PIPA have been a joke. SOPA's was really just embarrassingly one-sided. Everyone knows that hearings aren't actually a way for representatives to learn about issues, but the House Judiciary Committee didn't have to prove it so obviously.

Is this really two much to ask in a Democracy? Or are we just pretending at this point?

Gold Star: Post-SOPA: the path forward for addressing piracy

Its no secret that many leaders in Silicon Valley have libertarian leanings. Ask a startup cofounder or venture capitalist what the government can do to help promote innovation and you are likely to hear that the best thing it can do is get the heck out of the way. It is often said that the tech industry isn't engaged in Washington, and when technology business interests do have money to spend funding policy analysis it is often directed at organizations that focus on arguing against government regulation.

Progressives have not done a good job articulating how their ideas can compliment technology business interests. In order to successfully engage the tech industry, progressives will have to find ways to challenge the assumption that the government that best promotes innovation is the one that governs least. In fact, there are many ways in which a progressive policy agenda can support innovation, particularly by focusing on the security and freedom of individual people, both as citizens and as workers.

The technology industry improves our standard of living by making things more efficient through disruptive, competitive innovation, often at the hands of startup companies. Starting a company to pursue an idea is a risky endeavor. Venture capitalists expect 90% failure rates, and people who work for these companies often end up self employed or unemployed for periods of time.

Consider the various dilemmas faced by a person who has a secure job at a large company and an exciting new idea that might change his or her industry.

One challenge might be access to healthcare. A person with a pre-existing medical condition might think twice about quitting a secure job to start a company if it might be difficult or impossible to obtain health insurance on the individual market. This is also true for employees that startup might hire as it grows, as small companies cannot bargain with insurers on a level playing field with large employers. By advocating for universal healthcare, progressives help ensure that people can get the medical care that they need regardless of what sort of work they choose to do - opening up doors for people who want to strike out and do something risky.

Other facets of the social safety net that progressives advocate, such as unemployment insurance and programs that help people avoid foreclosure, also help limit the personal risks that are taken by people who want to go work for risky, innovative companies that are very likely to fail.

Labor and employment contract laws also play a role. Startups flourish in states that limit the enforcement of non-compete contracts - states where individual people have the right to quit their job at one company and go work for a competitor if they want to.

Startups also benefit from limits to Intellectual Property covenants in employment contracts. Most people have to work for a living. Chances are that someone who has an innovative idea will hav... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

It represents "a data bank of every digital act by every American" that would "let us find out where every single American visited Web sites," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill.

"The bill is mislabeled," said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. "This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It's creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes."

House panel approves broadened ISP snooping bill | Privacy Inc. - CNET News

We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.

Letter from China: The Chinese View of SOPA : The New Yorker

He said China's so-called Great Firewall, which blocks access to many foreign sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, was first billed as a strategy to stop piracy and pornography.

"Now it's being abused and extended to thousands of websites," he said.

Bloggers in China sound off on SOPA blackout - latimes.com

Somewhere in China today, in Russia today, and in many other countries that do not respect American intellectual property, criminals who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy.

As Clay Shirky pointed out on twitter, people in China also saw Americans stand up against state censorship of the Internet.

Patrick Leahy - On the message of yesterday's protests

An Indonesian civil servant who posted a Facebook message asserting that God did not exist was taken into protective custody after being badly beaten by a mob, some of them his colleagues.

The atheist identified as Alexander, who goes by just one name, now faces five years imprisonment for blasphemy after police officially arrested and charged him on Friday.

The Volokh Conspiracy » Indonesian Atheist’s Statement Leads to Mob Beating, Criminal Prosecution

Barcelona-based Carlos Sánchez Almeida, a veteran of Internet privacy and piracy fights in Spain, says he’s upset at the move because it endangers the legal contents stored in Megaupload, now inaccessible for company customers. In a post in his Jaque Perpetuo blog, he’s recommending that Spanish users of the service gather information about the files they may lose due to the FBI shutdown, in preparation for a legal claim.

I'm concerned that the MegaUpload takedown might have violated the US Privacy Protection Act. I'm not sure how much legitimate use of the service there was, but there was definitely some. The wholesale takedown of the site presents some challenging questions.

Spanish Anger at Megaupload Closure - Tech Europe - WSJ

From something I posted on ThinkProgress. Consider this my response to Lamar Smith's oped "The Truth about SOPA."

SOPA is just a step.

Once a blacklist is in place in the Internet the kinds of sites that it contains would expand - blacklisting will become an extremely simple, attractive policy option for anyone who dislikes any content on the Internet and wants to target it. Its worth repeating that just 15 years ago the United States Congress voted to remove all swear words from the open Internet. If they support that, there is no telling what other kinds of things they would seek to ban.

I have no doubt that if SOPA had been around a couple years ago they would have used it to blacklist Wikileaks when those State Department cables were dumped. I don't agree with the decision that Wikileaks made, but imagine the prospect that people in other countries would have been able to access those cables, once dumped, but Americans would not, and what the consequences of that would have been like.

Is that really the sort of future that we want?

The First Amendment would limit the scope of the blacklist, and I think it protects the content on Think Progress. It wouldn't be the end of the Internet - but it would be the end of the free Internet. What we can and cannot see is going to come down to court decisions regarding what the Constitution does and does not allow them to ban. Where judges think a "compelling state interest" exists.

Of course the proponents of SOPA are already lobbying other countries to create similar systems, so eventually you get a balkanized Internet where different things are blocked in different countries. The UK already has a SOPA style blacklist due to a decision in their courts earlier this year (Google Newzbin).

A big problem that I have with this is that we'll be making technology here in the United States to implement this blacklist, and we'll be exporting that technology to other countries where it will be used to censor content that our Constitution would protect. We would be enlisting our Internet engineering talent to build the tools that foreign governments will use to hide the truth from their people.

I wish ThinkProgress had taken a stand. The United States must send a message to the world that putting blinders up and attempting to hide the truth from people is not the right answer. Doing that is worth the cost of a few pirate sites that can't be shut down. Once you allow for blacklisting, and you accept it, the only difference between one country's blacklist and another country's blacklist is a matter of interpretation. We need to make a stronger case for individual freedom than that.

Lamar Smith:

So if SOPA only applies to foreign illegal websites, then why are Google and Wikipedia opposed? Unfortunately, one of the reasons why you can’t believe everything you read about the Stop Online Piracy Act is because some critics of this bill have generated enormous profits from illegal websites that sell stolen intellectual property.

I'm having a hard time understanding why Lamar Smith thinks that anyone would believe Wikipedia's motive in this is profit. People are not confused about what Wikipedia is and what their motives are.

I explain my thoughts on blacklisting here.

The Truth About SOPA | Fox News