There are many reasons so many folks who work the web are opposed to these bills. Beyond the fears of enshrining government sponsored censorship (ala China) which could easily kill your access to non-American news media (especially important in a crisis) and stifling innovation (by creating a precarious legal climate for startups), existing businesses models that allow users to link to content (youtube, twitter, flickr, imgur, you name it) could be put off the internet in one fell swoop at the whim of another industry. But theres another way to look at this issue – the economics of it don’t make any sense. All signs point to this as being a massive lobbying effort by the publishers and movie industry to break the web once and for all and theres a great article by Julian Sanchez (of the Cato Institute) on Ars Technia discussing the economics of piracy which goes into great detail exploring the claims of the RIAA and the movie industry for the supposed harms of piracy. 

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I originally posted this to the G+ app on the tablet, but have rewritten large parts of it here.

I was reading an article linked below on the tablet when I clicked a little “sharing” icon in my browser which passed the link to another application (G+). According to a recent ruling, you won’t be able to buy an HTC android device that can do that after April, 2012 (unless HTC figures out another way to do it) because Apple says they patented the technique in 1996. Apple was making Newtons and Power PCs running MacOS in 1996. The patent diagram even includes a floppy drive!. How ludicrous is it to try to apply a technique developed for an operating system long since abandoned (in favor of a open source unix OS) to shut down the use of a “similar” technique in an open source unix OS (android) developed 15 years later? Ironic because you have one company (Apple) which has built its last 10 years of success on top of an open source OS (OSX from BSD Unix) and is claiming another company can’t use some little piece of open source code because its similar to something they got rid of because it sucked?

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