As I have written elsewhere, Congress is debating the merits of controversial legislation intended to protect the movie and music industries from piracy of their copyrighted content. The legislation has had different names at different stages in the adoption process – E-PARASITE, SIPA, and currently the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. You can read the full text of the bill here. An analysis by the Center for Democracy & Technology is here.

The proposed legislation has attracted a lot of attention in recent days. Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt used the words “draconian” and “censorship” to describe the bill in a recent speech at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Google has joined AOL, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo in sending a letter of opposition to the bill to Congress. Mozilla is rallying users to oppose the legislation. The Brookings Institution says the bill creates more problems than it solves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's summary of industry opposition to the legislation is here.

Supporters of the bill include the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Pfizer, the AFL-CIO, MasterCard, and the American Apparel & Footwear Association. Maria Pallante, director of the U.S. Copyright Office, says the act is “essential” to halting online piracy.

At the center of the controversy is a disagreement over how much damage online piracy does to content creators and owners. A recent study – detailed here – suggests that although piracy of music and movies is widespread, it does not do as much harm to the entertainment industry as Hollywood believes. Hollywood, for its part, sticks to its position that every illicit download is a lost sale.

There are three main problems with SOPA as it is currently conceived. First, the act allows the government to eliminate access to suspected copyright-infringing Web sites before the sites' guilt has been established. Second, the bill significantly weakens the “safe harbor” provisions of existing piracy legislation, the DMCA. The safe harbor provision gives site operators the benefit of the doubt, for example, when users upload copyrighted material. It is the safe harbor provision that allows YouTube to stay in business by making good-faith efforts to delete copyrighted content uploaded by users. Finally, SOPA allows the government to create a list of sites that are off-limits. American companies can't do business with those sites – for example, they can't place advertising on them. This provision puts the government in the position of deciding which sites are acceptable fare for Americans. The potential for censorship is obvious.

SendWrite.com is making it easy to write your Congressional delegation to urge opposition to the bill. Just click here.

Web recommendation: Sign-on bonuses are no novelty in Silicon Valley startups. And it is common for hiring companies to pay a bonus to those who perform matchmaker services and refer new hires to them. But the folks at Scopely.com have taken these bonuses to an absurd new level. If Scopely hires you or the person you refer, you will receive a year’s supply of Dos Equis beer, a portrait of yourself painted in oils, a tuxedo, Cuban cigars, beard grooming oil, a cologne called “Sex Panther,” and $11,000 wrapped in bacon. See for yourself by clicking here. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He likes gin rummy.