It’s well known that the fight against piracy is one that governments around the world are sparing no expense to fight, but sometimes it feels as if their suggestions go a little too far. SOPA is one of those times.

SOPA, of course, is short for the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (PDF), an ambitious and lofty goal if ever there was one. Under this suggested bill, the Department of Justice would receive unprecedented powers when it comes to taking down so-called “rogue” web-sites from the Internet. All they would have to do is serve a court order to DNS providers, search engines – even advertisement agencies – and the website would be killed and taken down from the Internet, stricken from search engines and even have its advertisement revenue cut.

Naturally, this bill has been criticized by a number of people – free speech activists and advocates of digital rights - especially considering how unspecific and loosely termed it is. What sort of information would be needed for the DoJ to take down a website? What if 1% of the content of that domain is copyrighted and the rest are fine? What about if the person operating the domain is unaware of what’s being done with it? What if it’s been hacked?

Another common scenario we’ve seen in similar situations and which we have a legitimate reason to worry about here is when a bill is introduced for one purpose and then gradually begins to be used for another. The blacklist in Australia, for example, was set up to block access to piracy and child pornography, but has been proven to block other ‘uncomfortable’ sites as well. It winds up affecting more every-day users of the Internet than the criminals that it’s supposed to be stopping. With a law like SOPA in place, there would be no problem to simply send a subpoena requesting to take down the website of a business competitor, a political competitor, an ‘uncomfortable’ person or even an organization whose goals you don’t believe in?

An earlier version of SOPA, which a Senate committee approved earlier this year, was – of course – strongly supported by the various film and music industries while the civil liberties groups opposed it. Even Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said, after compared the draconian bill to the kind of laws that restrict free speech in China:

If there is a law that requires DNS to do x, and it’s passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president of the United States, and we disagree with it, then we would still fight it. If it’s a request, the answer is we wouldn’t do it; if it’s a discussion, we wouldn’t do it.

Ed Black, head of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said the bill was “akin to trying to block phones calls by ripping a page from a phone book”.

A hearing on the bill has been scheduled for November 16.