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Law Professors On SOPA and PIPA: Don't Break the Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Law professors Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post have just published a piece on the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act. In Don't Break the Internet, they argue that the two bills — intended to counter online copyright and trademark infringement — 'share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet's addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet's extraordinary growth, and for free expression.' They write, 'These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country's tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.'"
I am so sick of this ignorant "states rights" bullshit. It was a bad idea then, it's a bad idea now. We fought a stupid war over it, and you Confederate "States rights" morons lost. Time and again you lose, yet you WON'T GO AWAY. We a no longer "These united states", we haev long been "THE United states".... singular. Get over it and get used to it, or move your goddamned ass somewhere else.
And it's been the conservatives that have been usurping Constitutional right and expanding government power way faster than any liberal or progressive, so don't even go there. LIBERALS are all about the preservation of "Liberty".
"Libertarians" are just over-grown immature over-privileged white boys who fell in love with the idiot Ayn Rand's writings in their endless search for a superior justification for their own selfishness. They have no clue what it's like in the real world, or that many of the things we have (like a social safety net) evolved out of necessity, and are part and parcel of a *civilized* society.