Hollywood and the music industry lead the copyright cartel. They have been at war with the internet – and all technology they can’t control – since they realised that digital technology was creating huge challenges to their way of doing business. They have allies, to varying degrees, in other industries that include book publishing, software and pharmaceuticals, all of which are seeing their markets change and, in some cases, erode.

They’d already persuaded the US Congress to enact copyright laws that are grossly unbalanced on the side of the copyright holders and against the rights of users. Now, they’re back at the trough, and this time, they want to eliminate one of the few provisions that has any balance whatever: the so-called “safe harbor” giving immunity to websites that host other people’s postings. (The people doing the posting have no immunity.) When notified of a violation, sites must take down that material until and unless the original poster challenges that takedown.

Without safe harbor and several related provisions, much of the internet as we know it could not exist, because forcing websites to pre-screen everything that comes from users is untenable. And that is one reason why the copyright cartel’s friends and puppets in Congress have introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa), a bill designed, among other things, as an end run around safe harbor.

Today, the House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on Sopa (pdf). It’s a sham, of course: a stacked-deck collection of proponents with little time granted to people who want to keep the internet open and free for innovation. But Sopa and a companion bill in the Senate are being fast-tracked by politicians who either don’t realise what they are doing or don’t care about the damage they would cause to speech and innovation.

What Sopa’s proponents say is simple: online infringement is so bad and so prevalent that extraordinary measures are now needed to slow it down. They say they only want to go after the most egregious violators of copyright. A movie industry association blogger wrote that it would “target foreign rogue sites that knowingly and deliberately engage in the illegal distribution of stolen content, including movies and television shows, for profit”.

This is a partial truth, concealing a huge lie. The legislation is vaguely written and over-broad – no doubt, deliberately – and it would give copyright holders weapons that would go far, far beyond the “foreign rogue sites” the industry claims are the target. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has ably explained much of the damage this bill could cause, but here are a few especially bad provisions.