When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.
Any service that hosts user generated content is going to be under enormous pressure to actively monitor and filter that content. That's a huge burden, and worse for services that are just getting started -- the YouTubes of tomorrow that are generating jobs today. And no matter what they do, we're going to see a flurry of notices anyway -- as we've learned from the DMCA takedown process, content owners are more than happy to send bogus complaints. What happened to Wikileaks via voluntary censorship will now be systematized and streamlined -- as long as someone, somewhere, thinks they've got an IP right that's being harmed.
In essence, Hollywood is tired of those pesky laws that help protect innovation, economic growth, and creativity rather than outmoded business models. So they are trying to rewrite the rules, regulate the Internet, and damn the consequences for the rest of us.
This bill cannot be fixed; it must be killed. The bill's sponsors (and their corporate backers) want to push this thing through quickly, before ordinary citizens get wind of the harm it is going to cause. If you don't want to let big media control the future of innovation and online expression, act now, and urge everyone you know to do the same.
