unintended consequences

It seems that many of the supporters of SOPA blindly signed on thinking things like "gee, protecting copyrights sound good," but without looking at the details (or recognizing the implications).

Late last week and over the weekend, supporters of SOPA started pushing a slightly ridiculous idea that a bunch of big tech companies "supported SOPA." This was based on the fact that the oftentimes extremist organization, the BSA, had come out in favor of SOPA, and a few people chose to believe that meant every member of the BSA -- including companies like Apple, Intel and Dell -- supported SOPA.

The Federal Trade Commission is recommending updates to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which sounds timely, wise, and worthy.

But it is doing so blind to the impact and unintended consequences of its regulation.

Well here's a first. The top two vote getting posts for "most insightful," both were for comments from the same person... our very own Marcus Carab.

First up, was his comment concerning the story of Google putting the various Belgian newspapers back into its index, after they had sued Google for linking to them (and won), but then complained when Google stopped linking to them.

The Register: "A plan to populate the internet with hundreds or thousands of new top-level domains has security researchers pondering some of the unintended consequences that could be exploited by online criminals.

Some of the scenarios aren't pretty."

While there have been a a couple of politicians speaking out against the very questionable PROTECT IP Act, we hadn't heard much from various companies that would be seriously impacted by the law.

Thankfully, they're starting to speak up, starting with Google.

A few weeks back, Google got a ton of attention for offering a $900 million bid for a bunch of Nortel patents.

Google made it pretty clear that it was seeking these patents largely to keep them out of the hands of someone else who might start suing everyone.

However, there may be some unintended consequences.

Copycense points us to a blog post by Timo Boezeman on a book publishing blog, in which he points out that "fighting piracy is the dumbest thing you can do," as a publisher.

There isn't necessarily much new there for regular readers of this site, but it is a nice succinct summary of the issues.

Last fall it came out that the feds were going to push for a law that would require wiretap backdoors in all forms of internet communications.

We've noted in the past that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has long been an advocate of wider bans on various technologies in cars.

Just last month he said he hoped to have a complete ban on talking to any kind of device in your car, including mobile phones, telematics systems like OnStar, and GPS systems.