As the House Judiciary Committee prepares to launch hearings on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) tomorrow, a bi-partisan coalition of activists, advocates, and politicians warn that the proposed law will harm innovators, censor Americans, and disrupt the Internet. They held a press conference on Tuesday with two West Coast members of the House. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) charged that SOPA threatens the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, putting a wide variety of websites and platforms at risk of being strategically hobbled by well-funded rightsholders.

"A basic tenet is that the platforms and the pipes don't have responsibility for the content that others put in them," explained Lofgren. "Once there's a notice of a problem, then you have an obligation to act. That important principle would be put at risk if this bill were adopted. The implications for our economy would be dire."

SOPA is ostensibly designed to squelch pirate content sites by allowing the US Attorney General to get a court order forcing ISPs to block access, and by denying sites financial services like credit card or Paypal access. But critics charge that it is full of vague language, defining an infringing venue as "dedicated to theft of US property" if "it is taking, or has taken, deliberate actions to avoid confirming a high probability of the use of the US-directed site to carry out acts that constitute a violation" of US copyright laws. The bill could thus allow rightsholders to end run the DMCA's notice and takedown procedures—harming legitimate search engines and sharing sites alike.

Ed Black of the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) followed Lofgren. "One of the key elements of the industry that has allowed it to flourish is that it is the messenger," Black explained. "We believe in the concept of 'don't kill the messenger.'"

The financial life blood

A slew of advocacy groups also spelled the threat out to Judiciary Committee top brass Lamar Smith (R-TX) and John Conyers (D-MI) in a letter. SOPA creates a "private right of action of breathtaking scope," their statement warns:

Any rightsholder could cut off the financial lifeblood of services such as search engines, user-generated content platforms, social media, and cloud-based storage unless those services actively monitor and police user activity to the rightsholder's satisfaction. A mere accusation by any rightsholder would be sufficient to require payment systems and ad networks to terminate doing business with the service; the accused service's only recourse would be to send a counter-notice, at which point it would be at the networks' discretion whether to reinstate the service's access to payments and advertising. This would bypass and effectively overturn the basic framework of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), by pushing user-driven sites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to implement ever-more elaborate monitoring systems to 'confirm,' to the satisfaction of the most aggressive and litigious rightsholder, whether individual users are exchanging infringing content.

Signed—groups who often disagree with each other, among them TechFreedom, Public Knowledge, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Demand Progress, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Meanwhile, the Brookings Institution has published a position paper that carefully spells out what technology experts have been saying for months, that the DNS filtering/redirecting provisions in both the Senate's IP PROTECT Act and SOPA are the wrong way to defend copyrights.

They'll make the 'Net less secure, the study warns, as sites deploy rogue DNS servers to evade SOPA and as consumers get in on the act themselves. "It is easy to imagine a teenager altering the family PC to access a foreign infringing domain, but leaving the computer compromised for the family's other uses, including banking, accessing government websites and even work," the Brookings paper observes.

One of the few bright spots

How big is the opposition to SOPA and IP Protect? Just count the number of signers to statements released on Monday. A petition by technology companies to the House Judiciary Committee includes Facebook, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Google. A letter from human rights groups includes international groups from India's Center for Internet and Society to the Church of Sweden. The three major US consumer groups have sent in an opposition statement.

So have have eleven members of the House, among them Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Mike Doyle (D-PA), Ron Paul (R-TX), and Lloyd Doggett (D-TX).

"At a time of continued economic uncertainty, this legislation will result in fewer new businesses, fewer new investments, and fewer new jobs," they contend. SOPA would "cause serious and long term damage to the technology industry, one of the few bright spots in our economy."

Wednesday's Judiciary hearing will include representatives from the Motion Picture Association of America, MasterCard, Google, and the US Copyright Office. Stay tuned for our coverage.