For no good reason, a rant:<p>As far as I know, companies are not held legally accountable when their database is illegally accessed and consumer data (passwords and emails) are released to the public. In civil engineering, if a dam fails, the man who signed his name to the design is held responsible. Legally. And he likely loses his license. The same is true of doctors and lawyers.<p>It will not surprise me if the government steps in to create standards for online security; programmers have not taken steps to self-police.<p>The same seems true with SOPA. The theft of intellectual property is clearly a problem. A robots.txt file does not stop someone from scraping your content. There's been no effective self-policing and in its absence the result is a Congressional act.<p>Does the act go too far (by denying due process)? Sure. Might that get scaled back in the courts? Likely. Has Google, Wikipedia, or any of the countless sites protesting SOPA offered up an alternative that actually resolves the problem. No.<p>I don't support SOPA, but I have a hard time opposing it when this is the state of affairs it was born from.
For no good reason -<p>This post reminds me of John Carpenter's <i>They Live,</i> and that maybe what we really need to take care of SOPA is Rowdy Roddy Piper - whose website is, fortuitously, not blacked out today. <a href="http://www.rowdyroddypiper.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rowdyroddypiper.com/</a>