The following is adapted and expanded from some comments I left on Dr. Gene Veith’s post on Wikipedia going dark today.

Congress is considering two acts – the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) – which have as their stated goals the elimination of online piracy. This is a notable goal, and one I can get behind. The problem is, these acts do far more than just stop online piracy.

As a result, a broad group of companies and organizations and sites are protesting these acts today. Wikipedia has gone completely dark. Reddit has shut down. Google has blacked out their title and linked to a discussion of the downsides of these acts. Content producers ranging from tech sites and writers like Ars Technica and Tim O’Reilly to musicians like Peter Gabriel are deeply opposed to the acts. Why, you ask, would the people these acts purportedly aim to protect, opposed to them?

Put plainly, because these acts attack piracy the way one might try to kill termites… with a nuclear warhead. The amount of power granted to copyright owners by these acts is vastly out of proportion to the actual threat posted to them. More than that, the power granted to rights-holders is mind-bogglingly short on respect for the rights of anyone else.

Let me explain: if, in this post, I linked to a site (for non-piratical purposes) that also included pirated content (even if that content were posted by users and not by the site itself), a content-owner could take this site down, with no short-term legal recourse available to me. I’m not exaggerating here.

I could eventually get my site back up and running, but the burden of proof would be on me, rather than the accuser. Name another point in our legal system where the burden of proof is on the accused! This prospect alone should horrify every sensible person out there.

I’m all in favor of stopping piracy, but content owners should actually have to make their case in a court, the same as everyone else in every other circumstance. If I publish libel in a paper, you can and should sue me – but you don’t have the right to summarily demand, before a trial and without having presented any evidence, that all copies of the paper be burned and my printing press seized. You have to actually sue me and prove it in court. Likewise, a record company can’t walk into a record store and say, “We believe you are encouraging the illegal sale of stolen copies of our CDs; we’re shutting you down.” They have to go through the existing legal channels. By contrast, under PIPA and SOPA a rights-holder can block this site from search results, prevent me from receiving payments via Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, etc., and lock me out of all advertising channels – and all this without a trial.

Even the existing legal channels (e.g., the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) are arguably too lenient in terms of the power they grant to rights-holders – at least one company eventually won their case in court against the rights-holders but lost so much money to litigation they had to shut down anyway – but in any case, there are already legal channels by which rights-holders can have infringing content taken down. They just don’t want to have to actually do the legal work.

I’m not anti-business by any means, and as someone who does a fair amount of creative work on the side, I see the value in protecting intellectual property. However, I do not trust big business not to abuse power when it’s given to them. I don’t trust any large institution not to abuse power when it’s given to them. The temptation is simply too great, and human nature too predictable.

Given this, I urge everyone to call their congressmen and -women and urge them to vote against PIPA and SOPA. The easiest way to get that contact information for today is simply to go to Wikipedia and enter your zip code in the form present on the main page. In the future, you can find contact information for your Representative here, and for your Senators here.

Tomorrow I’ll have a note on defeating piracy. For further reading, see the following:

• SOPA Resistance Day Begins at Ars – Ars Technica
• End Piracy, Not Liberty – Google
• SOPA and PIPA – Learn more – Wikipedia