I’ve blogged quite a bit lately about SOPA and PIPA and the recent Internet blackouts and other protests against these bills, which threaten free speech and the open Internet (Mike Masnick et al. at Techdirt have also been great on exposing and analyzing SOPA).

As Jeffrey Tucker noted recently, the protests against SOPA started not with conservatives or even “libertarians,” but with civil libertarians of the “left,” as well as Silicon Valley tech types. Of course, some libertarians have been opposed to SOPA (and copyright) from the beginning — the more-radical and anti-state libertarians, in particular Austro-libertarians and left-libertarians.

Aside from the anti-state libertarians, however, most of the protests against SOPA concede that copyright is good, intellectual property is important and piracy is bad…but then they bemoan that SOPA “goes too far.”

For example, consider this article in PC Magazine, providing the response of 11 PC Mag staffers asked for their take on SOPA. The response to SOPA was universally negative, but most of them first prefaced their opposition to SOPA by genuflecting to copyright and recognizing that IP piracy “is, of course, a real problem.” For example:

• “Yes, theft of intellectual property is wrong, but it shouldn’t be protected at the cost of free speech and an open Internet”
• “SOPA is a perfect case of a disproportionate reaction to a real problem. Lawless websites full of pirated content are a real problem, but breaking the Internet isn’t the solution”
• “This proposed legislation is akin to having libraries monitored, or even shut down, because there is a chance that a book may contain a piece of plagiarized work”
• “IP is a precious thing. For example, every writer on PC Mag has had their work pirated at one time or another. However, this legislation goes” too far
• “There is definitely a need for content owners like movie ... (more)

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