Stop Online Piracy Act would stop online innovation

[Commentary] A bipartisan bill introduced last week in the House of Representatives would mark a fundamental change in Internet law, shifting liability for copyright piracy from the infringer to the host website.

It would chip away at critical safeguards that have shaped the Internet as we know it today, and many worry it would make it far more difficult for the next YouTube, Facebook or Craigslist to emerge and succeed. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is the counterpart to the Senate's pending PROTECT IP Act, which already had rights groups, academics and many online businesses up in arms. But the House bill goes much further. The goal of both bills is to give copyright holders stronger legal tools to go after sites that host unauthorized or counterfeit music, movies, software or goods, in particular "rogue" overseas sites that largely lie beyond the reach of U.S. law. It's a worthy goal, but not one worth sacrificing a critical enabler of online innovation, job creation and expression. "The limitation, censorship or stunting of such tools - because they may not support the guidelines of SOPA - would inevitably be bad for content creators and democracy more broadly," said Aaron Levie, chief executive officer of Box.net, a Palo Alto online storage and collaboration service. It's impossible to understand what the bill could do without first understanding the enormous influence of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.