Over the past decade, copyright holders have successfully shut down scores of Web sites and file-sharing services in a quixotic effort to halt the illicit circulation of movies, music and software online. None of it has made a dent in overall levels of piracy, and bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act are unlikely to fare any better.
Copyright owners already have many mechanisms at their disposal to go after pirate sites. Conscripting search engines, Internet service providers and advertisers as online copyright cops — as these bills propose — may not effectively choke off access to supposed "rogue sites" overseas, but it does threaten innovation by imposing new burdens on U.S. start-ups and scaring investors away from cloud storage services and new platforms for user-generated content. That also makes these laws open to abuse, since any platform that lets creators circumvent industry-controlled distribution channels will inevitably facilitate some copyright infringement. If the companies behind SOPA had their way, the government would have killed off the VCR and the MP3 player as well.
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