As you may know, Congress is considering two bills, SOPA and PIPA, to combat online piracy, ostensibly by foreign rogue websites. While the aim seems noble, the devil is in the details.

There are many criticisms of SOPA and PIPA (e.g. the ones at EFF, Gizmodo, and reddit), but let me focus on one: under the proposed law, linking to a website with infringing content is illegal.

Censorship aside, that presents a huge day-to-day operational problem for many law-abiding websites. For a blog like Neatorama, which has nearly 40,000 posts and over 311,000 comments, this means that we'd have to police every single comment to ensure that nobody links to a rogue site (and continuously checking that legitimate links in past comments haven't gone rogue), otherwise we'd be breaking the law. A gargantuan task, indeed.

I urge you to contact your members of Congress and ask them to vote against SOPA and PIPA: Link

Update #1 1/18/12: Sign the Petition or Call Your Representative and tell them to vote against SOPA and PIPA - Thanks for the suggestion, ray hahn! Update #2: Header on all Neatorama posts now links to the petition and call pages.