Originally Posted by u-Bob

Yes.

Remember those pornpolice threads a couple of weeks ago? A program owner hired an IP rights enforcement agency to protect their IP rights. That 'agency' then collected urls of pages that violated those rights and reported them to Google (under the DMCA). Google then removed those urls from its SERPs resulting in a drop in traffic for those pages. As it later turned out, some of those sites that were reported to Google were sites that belonged to affiliates of that program (and in no way violated the program owner's rights) and even to the program owner himself.

And that was only DMCA. SOPA grants even more powers to those who CLAIM to be the IP owner or CLAIM to be an agent for the IP owner.

This is not aimed at you, but I find the shortsightedness of those who at the same time fail to see the potential problems with SOPA and applaud it simply because it is called "Stop Online Piracy Act" worrisome. To be honest, it reminds me of 1984. In the book, the organization that was responsible for the government's propaganda efforts was called the Ministry of Truth.

Why do they call this bill the "Stop Online Piracy Act"? So they can accuse their opponents of being pirates or supporters of piracy. (Same reason the Patriot Act was called the Patriot Act so they could accuse their opponents of being unpatriotic.). It's politics 101 and yet so many on GFY still fall for it.

Last year, I took an IP course (8 week evening course at the local university). The class was quite a diverse group; university and college students, journalists, bloggers, documentary makers, entrepreneurs, a political activist/organizer, designers,...
Guess who was most worried about the way IP legislation is heading? The content producers. The film makers, documentary makers, the journalists and bloggers. Want to interview someone in a pub where there's music playing, a big logo of company XYZ in the background and ask questions about how company ABC produces a product DEF that contains a certain defect? Good luck.