There’s been a delay in the vote on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, fap fodder for the Record Industry Association of America and movie studios. I’m all for copyright protection, but this bill goes a bit far. It may cause many news and entertainment sites to shut down or risk heavy fines. For example:

Right now Reddit is protected by the DMCA’s safe harbor provision which only requires Reddit to take down content if copyright holders ask them to, but SOPA can change this liability when a site is deemed to “facilitate copyright infringement.”

Because the definitions and terminology in the bill are so vague, passing SOPA in its current form poses a threat to all user-generated sites online, and many other websites too.

The vote on SOPA has been delayed until early next year, which may give online petitioners opposed to the act time to gather more signatures–they have 29,000 and counting. And it may give the RIAA and several studios time to explain a wee little problem they have: Someone/s at the RIAA has downloaded sixty full episodes of Dexter, according to a program which logged the BitTorrent activity of some 50 million users.

Let’s see, 60 episodes with a fine of $150,000 each. Golly, that’s $9 million! Meanwhile

a Russian BitTorrent tracking firm traced pirated movies and television show downloads back to IP addresses from Sony, Fox, and NBC—as TF points out, “these are the same companies who want to disconnect people from the Internet after they’ve been caught sharing copyrighted material.”

Avast thar mateys! Keep yer own ship free of of the pox of piracy, before ye be poking into the old intertubes!