Over on Techdirt, Mike Masnick has pointed out the mother of all ironies: The Pirate Bay, one of the largest outlets of copyright infringement, would be immune to the takedown tendrils of the imminently incoming Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Apparently it all comes down to the fact that The Pirate Bay has a .org domain — and according to Masnick, the current version of the SOPA bill working its way through congress excludes American domestic domains from being the target of takedown notices from copyright holders. In this case, a “domestic domain” is any domain that comes from a TLD run by an American registry — and sure enough, .org’s registry is Public Interest Registry, a US non-profit based in Virginia. In other words, thepiratebay.org isn’t eligible for a SOPA-based takedown, even if its servers are based in Sweden or another country outside the US.

Believe it or not, by the same logic, .com and .net domains — both of which are managed by American company VeriSign — would also be immune from the SOPA bill as it currently stands.

Presumably the bill distinguishes between domestic and non-domestic domains for legal or political reasons. SOPA was originally designed to target any “US-directed site” — i.e. any site that is accessible from the US — but a recent amendment narrows the target of SOPA down to “foreign internet sites.” If this is really the case, SOPA, as it stands, is toothless.

As stupid as all this sounds, this is fairly representative of what happens when lawmakers try to write laws that curtail the use of general-purpose computers (PCs) and networks (the internet). If you know anything about the decentralized nature of the internet, you can see how stupid a law like SOPA is — and how ludicrous it is to base a website’s location on its TLD registry. SOPA, at its most basic, grants copyright holders the provision to to blackhole a website at the DNS level and force search engines to delist an infringing site. In a perfect world, as far as SOPA’s sponsors and supporters are concerned, this would effectively break the internet. In reality, though, there is no way in hell that the US will be able to police foreign DNS servers or search engines.

The internet has proven time and time again that it’s virtually impossible to control. Unfortunately, this has the double-barreled effect of a) terrifying lawmakers, and b) forcing them to make heavier and more aggressive laws in the hope that something might stick. That’s why we’re now staring down the smooth, rifled tubes of a SOPA shotgun. If you haven’t complained to your local Representative, it’s not too late.

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