Why SOPA might kill commenting, and is that such a bad thing?

UPDATE: I think the anti-SOPA blackouts at Google, Wikipedia etc are a gigantic wasted opportunity to educate people about DRM. And I’m skeptical of Google putting money where their mouth is.

I get it, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is bad because it doesn’t actually do anything to stop piracy. There are various screeds online, from left and right alike. It’s basically an article of faith that SOPA will “kill the internet”, but I’m not entirely convinced. The best article by far against SOPA and the most convincing argument is not by political sites but rather the techsphere, specifically Tom’s Hardware:

As an example, imagine a user posts a video clip to the Tom’s Community of a step-by-step guide on how to set up water cooling on an overclocked i7 CPU. Playing in the background behind the voiceover is “Derezzed” by Daft Punk. The studio representing Daft Punk could issue a complaint, without being required to notify us or request a take-down. Tom’s Hardware would be liable and prosecuted solely on a good faith assertion of the copyright owner, without notification, with the site operators subject to possible jail time for not preventing the video from being posted. In short order, the http://www.tomshardware.com/ domain in the United States would no longer resolve to our servers and visitors attempting to come to Tom’s Hardware would be redirected to a “This site under review for piracy/copyright violations” page.

To conform to these new restrictions would mean that Tom’s Hardware would have to switch to a review/approval process for any and all new posts to our forums and articles. Our community team would have to approve every single news comment, every new thread, and every new response before it went live and filter them for potentially infringing material. Even so, we would still possibly be under threat from violations not caught – a user posting a paragraph from “Unix for Dummies” as an example or a snippet of software news from another website in excess of a certain summary threshold. That’s just here on Tom’s. The effect on sites like YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and the rest of the internet would be devastating, and progress and innovation would grind to a halt under the cumbersome new restrictions.

I’m not sure if the scenario above would be as cut and dried as Tom’s states. In that example, the offending post would likely be flagged by the IP owner and that information would be given to Tom’s. If Tom’s wants to shut down their whole site, that’s their choice, but a simple targeted hiding of the offending post would probably suffice instead. We are living quite comfortably in an era where content violations are removed surgically from Youtube all the time and yet the Internet hasn’t collapsed.

But the broader issue as I see it is simply, are websites liable for their users? Which might be more broadly restated as, is there a right to comment? I think the answer to the former question is a yes and to the latter is a no.

Parislemon already closed his comment systems, Dave Winer uses Disqus, and Ars Technica’s top user forums are only available to paid users. These are all different mechanisms for signal-noise filtering. Killing off usercontent is only necessary when the userbase is essentially random, uncontrolled, hostile (the default state of most user spaces towards their hosts). But SOPA would kill the anonymous, seething mass of commentary and force everyone into more regulated userbase management. Why is that bad?

Arguably, increased liabilty from users might even lead to a rebirth of blogging – after all, if you have something to say,better to say it in a space you control rather than someone else’s. The first company to offer blog hosting services and security on par with wordpress.com but also allowing the user to retain complete control over the blog on par with a wordpress.org install is going to cause a new revolution. Blork, maybe?

Related: Dave Winer says SOPA will lead to a Disneyified web. We just got back from Disney World, and it’s called the Happiest Place on Earth for a reason – it’s tightly scripted, carefully managed, and meticulously designed to be that way (not unlike using Apple ecosystem products, but I digress…). It’s only we power users who are ever really unhappy – the vast bulk of the userbase will sit in line for 100 minutes to ride Peter Pan or accept limitations on bandwidth and copyright takedowns, as long as Hulu gets them their weekly fix of Gossip Girl.

In fact, in the longer term, having our capitalist overlords clamp down on the web might actually force some innovation beyond this aging platform. Leave the disneyweb to the world and lets have new parallel networks tailored for specific niches, built on new technologies and standards. Why do we force video to travel over http, for example? Or file sharing? Shadow internets already exist, such as the mobile web, Facebook, or the torrent community. Having one network to rule them all is a gigantic kludge.

comment policies

Question for whoevere it is that still reads the blog on any semi-regular basis: is it too hard to comment here? I’m debating switching to a system like IntenseDebate and my goal is to really make it very easy to leave a comment without making you jump through any hoops, while still preserving me from an onslaught of spam.

I’d like to solicit your opinions – especially if you usually don’t comment but read regularly.

FYI here’s the features that using IntenseDebate would bring. I just want to remove obstacles to discussion, basically.

comment registration

One thing I value about this blog is that I still have loyal readers despite my long hiatuses and delays in posting. I can always count at least one or two comments on a post at minimum, and often from people who have never commented before. This is possible because of the open commenting policy here, but that’s also a weakness in that it allows spammers a toehold. The spam filter has been doing its job but lately more and more are sneaking past the defenses, and I am worried that it will get worse form here.

The question is the usual one facing a blog with a nascent community. Do I limit comments to registered users only, thus slamming the door on the casual readers who will probably never comment again? Or do i leave the door open in the hope that signal stays higher than noise?

I guess I could also install a plugin to auto-close old comment threads to see if that mitigates the problem. And there are math captcha plugins like I used before. But these are just symptomatic solutions.

So, lets see what you all have to say about it. What would you prefer? Whats your advice?