Today across the internet many major websites, including Reddit, Wordpress, and Wikipedia are going dark in protest over some insidious legislation making it’s way though the US Congress; the Protect IP act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

I’d elaborate more, but I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation has done a much better job of it than I could.

The way I see it, the easy piracy genie is out of the bottle. Much like nuclear weapons, there’s virtually no way to put that genie back in the bottle. Draconian legislation won’t stop piracy, it almost certainly won’t even slow it down. What it will do, however, is drive it increasingly underground

However, in the process of trying to do the impossible, these laws will almost certainly take down countless sites that aren’t doing anything illegal at all, quite probably to the determent of many individuals and small businesses struggling to survive as it is.

As an author and photographer, especially now in the digital age, I have to rely on copyright laws to protect my work. However, at the same time I recognize the need for those protections to be reasonable or they risk harming those of us that aren’t multi-billion dollar corporations, and who can’t afford to spends millions on attorneys, more than anyone else.

From where I sit, the SOPA/ProtectIP act certainly aren’t reasonable, especially in the light of the potential to have both my income frozen and my site shutdown by someone acting maliciously with out money or ability to fight that in court. Don’t think it could happen? The DMCA is already been abused that way to temporarily censor non-infringing content, and the DMCA has a extra-judicial counter-notice mechanism that the ProtectIP/SOPA lack.