* Yesterday saw an outpouring of opposition to the vile SOPA/PIPA legislation. Several members of the Illinois congressional delegation contacted me to say that they were withdrawing their support or announcing that they were opposed. Others announced opposition to local media. And this movement wasn’t just confined to Illinois…

It appeared by Wednesday evening that Congress would follow Bank of America, Netflix and Verizon as the latest institution to change course in the face of a netizen revolt.

Legislation that just weeks ago had overwhelming bipartisan support and had provoked little scrutiny generated a grass-roots coalition on the left and the right. Wikipedia made its English-language content unavailable, replaced with a warning: “Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” Visitors to Reddit found the site offline in protest. Google’s home page was scarred by a black swatch that covered the search engine’s label.

* The online protest was so intense that it knocked several Senate websites offline…

Around 11 a.m. PT [yesterday], the rush of visitors looking for ways to contact their members of Congress overwhelmed several Web pages of individual senators. […]

The amount of traffic “temporarily shut down our Web site,” Sen. Ron Wyden, the leading opponent of the Protect IP Act, wrote on Twitter.

By noon PT, the Senate’s Web sites were loading again, but slowly or with difficulty. The Web site of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who’s a sponsor of Protect IP, was generating a 500 server error.

Other Senate Web pages displayed this message: “Sorry, the web page you have requested is experiencing technical difficulties. The Webmaster has been alerted. You will be automatically redirected to the www.senate.gov home page after 10 seconds.”

* But not everybody was happy with yesterday’s actions…

In one early sign that the blackouts and protests would have an effect, the MPAA yesterday characterized them as “stunts.” The group’s chairman, Chris Dodd, took a thinly veiled swipe at Wikipedia by denouncing the protests as “an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [the sites] for information and [who] use their services.”

* Chris Dodd is a former Democratic US Senator and is a longtime friend of US Sen. Dick Durbin. Sen. Durbin is still listed as a co-sponsor of this legislation. And despite a promise by his press person yesterday, Durbin’s office never did get back to me about why he is still supporting this goofy bill. He did, however, send a form letter to an Illinois blogger…

Effective enforcement of intellectual property laws is critical to the encouragement of innovation and the creation of jobs. In recent years, we have seen a proliferation of Internet websites that are devoted to the unauthorized distribution and sale of pirated and counterfeit goods. These websites deprive innovators and businesses of revenue and result in the loss of American jobs. In addition, these websites present a public health concern when they sell counterfeit, adulterated, or misbranded pharmaceutical products.

I will keep your views in mind as the Senate considers this issue in the coming months.

* Let me make something very clear here. I hate pirates. I publish a copyrighted newsletter, and I have had to take action against people who posted material from that newsletter online.

But pirates, by very definition, operate outside the law. They’re gonna be with us pretty much no matter what. Stomping on the 1st Amendment and breaking the Internet in order to stop some pirates who will find another way to evade the law anyway seems pretty stupid to me. In other words, Congress shouldn’t mess with people like me in order to get at the pirates. It’s insane.

* Here is a good summary of some of this bill’s harmful impact…

1. Guilty until proven innocent. One huge issue with the ways these bills are written is that you don’t necessarily have to be a proven violator of copyright infringement, all you have to do is be accused. An accusation alone is enough to cause detrimental harm to your business. You could lose your domain, have your website shut down and even be sued. All with no warning.

2. You’re held responsible for your user content. If you have any part of a website, blog or social networking page that allows for users to submit content, you will be responsible for what they submit. For example, if you have a blog and allow comments, you’ll be responsible for monitoring them to make sure you don’t have any pirated content submitted or links provided to sites that contain pirated content. Or, if you are on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll be responsible for monitoring your followers’ posts on your page to make sure they don’t have forbidden content. Can you imagine how difficult this will be?

3. Social networking as we know it will change. We all use social networking to build our businesses, but if these bills are passed, social networking sites will be forced to drastically censor their sites, limiting the content that can be shared and changing the way we use them for our businesses.

4. Where to sell your items? If you rely on sites like Etsy, Ebay or even Facebook to sell your items, you’ll be up a creek as they’ll be forced to shut down to avoid prosecution. Each of these sites contain photos submitted by users, the problem is, there would be no way for them to inspect every single photo uploaded to their sites to make sure it has the appropriate copyrights.

* And I couldn’t agree more with this…

The world has changed. The way that people discover and purchase new content has changed. It’s a new world. They should try living in it — and continuing to prosper in it — instead of trying to shove it back the way it was when Groucho Marx still had a hit TV show.

Exactly.

Get a clue, Senator Durbin. Man up and tell your old buddy Dodd that legacy media shouldn’t be allowed to write legislation that regulates new media. And, trust me, I will never forget this vote. Ever.