The following was forward to me by Bil Danielson (the author) for publication here – all rights reserved.

If you supported (or attended) the protests in Madison over collective bargaining, you were exercising your freedom of speech. If you protested the protestors in Madison, you too were exercising your freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is, in fact, what I would consider an inviolable, sacrosanct, principle of American-style democracy and fully reflects the brilliant enlightenment ideology of our founders and the founding documents they penned. It doesn’t mean you are endowed with some un-sourced, uncaused, supernaturally or socially granted right to say what you want, wherever, and whenever. Freedom of speech is fundamentally premised upon the recognition and due respect for the property upon which one speaks – it is a reflection and outgrowth of the fundamental of individual rights.

When you have permission from those who have ownership of said property to speak, you are enjoying the freedom of speech, properly understood. If you do not have their permission, and speak anyway, you are wrongfully trespassing and violating their pre-emptive right to hold and enjoy property privately. This means the land upon which you are holding your sign, or speaking into your megaphone; the building in which you rise to deliver your message; the radio station or television studio in which you are crafting your words and images; or, indeed, the very web page upon which you are posting your thoughts (video, writing, audio message). Since we the people have granted to government the unique use of physical force in our society, they have a profound role to uphold the individual rights of property owners who invite-or give permission to-people to speak. We have the right to speak our minds provided we do not violate the actual rights of others in the process – my individual rights end where yours begin. Were you or I invited onto private property to speak and demonstrate, and the police (or anyone) used force to unilaterally silence such speech THAT would be a violation of your freedom to speak and the property rights of the landowner. Alternatively, if you run into a lecture hall where an invited speaker is presenting views you are opposed to, and begin to shout, interrupting the speaker, it is YOU who are violating the speaker’s (and the venue owner’s) freedom of speech – you are NOT legitimately exercising your own freedom, but rather preventing someone else from it.

If you were one of the impassioned protestors in Madison who showed up on the steps of the capital, on either side of the debate, you were exercising this protected right and the principles behind it. You were not hauled off to jail as a consequence of protesting against Governor Walker because the land upon which you demonstrated is owned, theoretically, by no one in particular, and everyone simultaneously, i.e. public property. If we lived in a dictatorship, Governor Walker could have simply ordered the Capital Police to seize your signs, and toss you in jail. Protesting on public lands is, in fact, a unique case in an otherwise general freedom of speech. It is the government’s agents responsibility to ensure that your right to speak is protected, and not violated – whether it be on public lands (while abiding the reasonable access rules needed), or, especially, on private property. The worst case of all is where the government presumes ownership of all property and simply uses its unique access to physical force to censor you from speaking out merely because the message you want to deliver is either antagonistic to, or otherwise inconsistent with, official government policy. Tied for first worst, you are hauled off, or censored, because someone standing next to you, who you don’t know or perhaps don’t even agree with, held up a sign or played some audio that the government didn’t appreciate, or violated someone’s intellectual property rights, and therefore you were summarily denied the right to speak (or even remain on the premises because the government could condemn the property forthwith) by use of the force of government – all without any due process. That is what happens in a dictatorship, or any overtly tyrannical, or theocratic/religious, state.

Which brings me to SOPA (and PIPA) –ill-conceived legislation supported by the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), and others who claim (correctly) that piracy of protected material is a problem on the internet. The stated intention of this expansion of the Federal Government’s power over the internet is ostensibly to protect intellectual property, such as music, video content, and literature. While protecting the individual rights of intellectual property owners IS a legitimate function of government, it cannot be the case that such protection simultaneously tramples the rights of other’s free speech in the process. But that is exactly what this legislation would do. The legislation’s fundamental premise is that the internet is actually the property of the United States Government, and as such those who happen to be in power today can unilaterally use force to restrict your and my ability to exercise our freedom of speech, properly understood. The proponents of SOPA view the internet as being owned by the United States Government, and therefore subject not just to protection of intellectual property, but to the overt use of force to shut down entire websites and internet communities without the application of the rule of law. This is wrong, it is a violation of property rights, and in fact a violation of the individual rights of website owners and other content producers.

As stated on Wikipedia’s site “The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.[4]”

This is analogous to all the protestors against Governor Walker who were on the grounds of the capital in Madison being hauled off, en-masse, because a single protestor on the other side of the block held up a sign that violated the copyright of some third party. If you or I violate a copyright in our activity on the internet, if someone pirates intellectual property, that is a problem and piracy laws are already in force. But trampling the rights of otherwise innocent website owners and their law abiding site visitors is not the solution – but that is exactly what SOPA would do.

I rarely agree with Hillary Clinton, but I do agree with her when she said: “When ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us.. There isn’t an economic Internet and a social Internet and a political Internet. There’s just the Internet.”

Today Wikipedia, and numerous other sites, are offline to protest this proposed legislation. I stand in full support of Wiki in this matter. Oppose SOPA! If such laws are allowed to pass in America, then we deserve the noose because we have given the government the rope and the authority to tie the knot.