Moore's Law Trumps More Law

[Commentary] Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) last week said he was putting off a vote on online piracy legislation "in light of recent events." Those events were Silicon Valley proving that it can harness the power of the Web to protect itself against Washington—the clearest evidence yet of how technology moves so fast that regulations have no chance of keeping up.

Computer science trumped political science over the arcane topic of copyright. Hollywood and the music industry had lobbied for laws aimed at foreign websites that violate copyright; the laws included banning search engines from linking to the websites and even deleting them from the Web altogether. These intrusive remedies, which would have been at the discretion of the Justice Department, included vague rules that could have affected U.S. websites. The proposals went far beyond simply bringing foreign sites into line with the copyright protections in effect domestically.