Online Piracy and Political Overreach

[Commentary] For months, it seemed as if Congress would pass an online antipiracy bill, even though its main weapons — cutting off the financing of pirate Web sites and making them harder to find — risk censoring legitimate speech and undermining the security of the Internet. But the unmovable corporations behind those bills have run into an unstoppable force: an outcry by Internet companies led by Google and Wikipedia that culminated in an extraordinary online protest. We are happy that the drive to pass antipiracy legislation has slowed enough that Congress might actually consider all its implications carefully. Lawmakers can now act wisely to create tools that can help combat the scourge of online piracy without excessive collateral damage.