[Coda]

As far as I understand, people who support SOPA haven't actually read the bill (or can't understand it; it's written in pretty opaque legalese) but instead are in support of the idea of passing legislation to deal with foreign pirate sites (or at least don't want to be seen opposing it). And there's nothing wrong with wanting to deal with piracy. But SOPA doesn't even follow the precedent from DMCA (which despite its initial critics has actually turned out to be a pretty good way of handling it) -- SOPA doesn't require that the defendant even be informed that there's action being taken against them. THIS, really, is the biggest LEGAL problem.

There's a lot of commentary about censorship. The fact is that SOPA doesn't actually enable direct censorship (at least not for US sites), and there are no first-amendment rights at stake. This is a common misconception, and it's intentionally supported by a lot of knowing parties for the sake of raising awareness of the problem. The censorship is INDIRECT -- by being subject to a SOPA claim, a site can have its funding and support and search results stripped away, which may lead to the site's closure. The reason this comes up as a "censorship" issue is that the lack of notification and the unreasonable appeals process means that someone who wishes to censor you can make a FALSE SOPA claim against you and you won't know about it until you're already screwed.

The "end of the Internet" hype is all about what a website would have to do to eliminate all risk of a potential SOPA claim -- to remove itself from being considered a site that supports piracy (and therefore immune from SOPA claims), a site would practically have to remove all sources of user-contributed material or it would have to moderate all user input for copyright issues before allowing them to be made visible. As doing this would destroy most social/crowd-sourced sites, most sites would therefore have to endure the liability of being subject to a false SOPA claim. This isn't a problem with DMCA because the site receives notice to remove the infringing content, but with SOPA the only clue you have is that your ad revenue check suddenly stops coming in, at which point it's too late to appeal because those checks only come in every month but the appeals window is only a week.

The technical problems with SOPA are of course a big deal too, and requiring every DNS server and search engine in the country to obey a certain blacklist is commercially impractical for smaller ISPs and technically difficult for most search engines. But as this isn't an actual LEGAL problem with the bill, complaints in this direction are practically outweighed by the strength of "it's worth the cost" arguments.