2 days before SOPA vote I will shutdown my websites in protest. Will you?

My post was intended as a message of encouragement for those with a significant non-techie userbase to bite the bullet and consider a protest shutdown.

It's my belief that non-techie users are far more likely to take an anti-SOPA shutdown maintenance page more seriously than a forum post or added element in the regular page layout of a site.

All actions in 102(c)(2) are extremely broad. An entire "foreign infringing site" can be knocked offline and blacklisted solely on the assertion (of self-interested corporate players and their AG cronies) that there is criminal copyright infringement occurring on the site. A public forum with 1 million non-infringing posts and 1 infringing post can theoretically be killed by the AG. In my opinion this will lead to an uptick in self-censorship by website owners desperate to avoid losing everything. And those that do get targeted get no chance to make their case in the court of law or even file a counter-notice like the DMCA so _graciously_ allows (and we all know how effective that system has turned out to be.) A public forum is blacklisted and all you get is a nice letter in the mail.

I also believe the danger of prior restraint comes into play in the immunity clauses of 102(c)(5). No claim or cause of action against service providers, domain registrars, search engines, payment networks, or ad services is allowed for "reasonable acts" designed to comply with SOPA court orders. The likely result of this is hair-trigger blocking of websites at the first sniff of a court order. Why not? They get immunity for that behavior.

The anti-circumvention penalties in 102(c)(4) are naked censorship provisions. In my opinion, code is a form of speech, potentially protected by the 1st amendment. The authors of SOPA obviously feel differently.

And finally, SOPA will mandate the build-out of a new infrastructure dedicated to censoring websites quickly, based on a "master list" stewarded by the AG and compiled by his corporate paymasters. Others have argued, and I tend to agree, that the mere existance of such an infrastructure makes it all the more likely that lawmakers will seek to expand it's purview to other areas (domestic sites, "terrorist sites", etc.) in the future.