I mean, this is good, and maybe I'm being extra cynical, but it doesn't sound terribly promising.

Nah, that's what I do for fun. :)

If I'm a rabid-dog-shooting, eloquent law student, does that make me Atticus Finch? Because that would be cool.

Yes to everything before the first question mark, but no to everything after. Criminal copyright infringement has some extra requirements and the total value of the infringed works must be over $1,000.

The point wasn't that the sites blacking out would necessarily be the ones shut down, the point was to raise awareness. Yes, PIPA only applies to foreign sites, but we shouldn't be censoring foreign sites either—what if the next YouTube isn't in the US? Does that make it okay to order search engines to not link to it…

I've always thought that too. It never made sense to me that we criticized politicians for having the intellectual honesty to admit they were wrong, or the presence of mind to defer to their constituents.

This:

Well, I think there are a lot of other forums and message boards that are not only not good, but worse. Kotaku isn't necessarily the worst. And there are certainly good apples in the mix, a lot of them even. But it gets so tiring having to deal with the crazy ones to get to the good stuff. A few bad experiences tends…

I mean, it says something that I got these comments from exactly the kind of person I was talking about mere minutes after my initial post. That's not a sign of a good community to me.

There is some good criticism in the comments, but there is a lot of terrible criticism too. Is it mostly the awful stuff? Probably not. But there is enough of it that it is very troubling. There doesn't need to be a majority of hateful comments to make a problem, a vocal minority is bad enough.

Nevermind. I just read some of your other posts, I'm done talking to you.

Saying what you're saying is only slightly better. This doesn't demonize straight people in any way and it's ridiculous to say so. The article is very cautious and forgiving, it almost actively tries to absolve DICE and EA of any blame, it just focuses on the harmful effects of what they unintentionally did. The only…

I know we've just been told that Kotaku commenters are great, but some of these comments are unbelievable. There are some people who have written good critical responses, but so many of these are just insane.

Uh, trust me, judges know the difference between copyrights and trademarks.

Does it still work on facebook? I remember it did back in the day but when I tried it recently it didn't...

Yeah, but it wouldn't make much sense for Congress to do so. It doesn't fit into the bill's purpose at all, trademark infringement online is a very different problem then copyright infringement online, which is probably why you never hear about trademark infringement issues. Companies don't have to worry about people…

[www.law.cornell.edu]

Well, there's no excuse now, Congress has had plenty of time to see what the PATRIOT Act does, they should repeal it. :p

I don't think the target of the regulation changes whether it is a regulation or not. But I wouldn't call it a regulation because it mostly just adds enforcement mechanisms for existing rules rather than new rules.

They couldn't copyright it, and I think SOPA only applies to copyrights, not trademarks.