How SOPA & PIPA Could Hurt Scientific Debate

mwolfam writes with this pointed excerpt from a piece at the Huffington Post by Los Alamos National Laboratories post-doc researcher Michael Ham, who makes a slightly different case than most for the reasons that SOPA and PIPA should be stopped: "Simply put, The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) currently under development in Congress will provide a rapid way to sentence websites to death without the need for pesky things like trials and juries. Much to the surprise of nobody who understands how the Internet works, these two Acts will have absolutely no effect on digital piracy, but they will create an environment where freedom of speech could be severely curtailed, large companies can execute competitors, and scientific data can be hidden from the public."

Comments

Re:Fear not, this will not be a real problem

[Elbereth]

We'll see. I'm sure you'll figure out some way to salvage a way to be proven right, just like you've found a way to justify Slashdot's paranoia about RFID. You're arguing that the basic concept was proven correct ("Someone, somewhere will eventually track us with something"), while I'm arguing that Slashdot's Chicken Little antics made it that much easier for someone to actually track you. The more you scream, "The sky is falling!", the easier it becomes for people to tune you out, as the ravings of a kook. You're unwilling accept that Slashdot was raving about a non-issue, elevating it into a world-ending catastrophe that would plunge the world into fascism. Slashdot is doing the exact same thing again, now. Do you seriously think people will listen to you, when you say things like the internet will become "an exclusively corporate and government domain"? Where do you go from there? How do you express the danger of legislation that explicitly outlaws freedom of speech on the internet? Of course, you'll probably say that's exactly what SOPA does. In that case, all I can say is that when some piece of legislation eventually does pass, which revokes freedom of speech online, you'll have made its passage that much easier. Nobody will listen to me, because they've already learned to tune out that message, as fear-mongering. Doubtlessly, you'll hold up that legislation as a victory, saying that you were right all along, even as you pave the way for it to pass.