There are a good number of valid points, but the article's arguments in support of SOPA and PIPA are weak. Even assuming that online copyright violations are a

There are a good number of valid points, but the article's arguments in support of SOPA and PIPA are weak. Even assuming that online copyright violations are a cancer on the economy, there needs to be some sense of proportionality. Most people and organizations didn't necessarily object to better enforcement; they objected to the manner. Crime is likely to decrease if we were to install surveillance cameras on every street corner, but those cameras are neither reasonable nor conducive to a free society. The most compelling argument is the importance of large-scale corporate surveillance to infringements on civil rights. To its (partial) credit, Google is as open as it can be about governmental requests for its vast troves of information. It turns over data to governments more than 200,000 times per year [0], often without a warrant (or equivalent) and frequently to countries with appaling human rights records. Further, it has at least once turned over a list of all people who were in area at the time of a crime [1]. Google may have collected location data for benign reasons, but it has now been used to harm its users. I fear this pattern is going to play out with more frequency and greater severity. [0] https://transparencyreport.google.com/ https://transparencyreport.google.com/ [1] http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/article200271984.html http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/...