In my mind the greatest evil is to take away free expression, especially when it’s to silence critics.

Many critics of SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA point to this as an easy abuse of those kinds of legislation. Currently on YouTube with the DMCA all it takes is one spurious claim and a video is removed. Even more scary is if someone is unable to respond to such charges (hospitalized, on vacation, etc) then it would be possible to someone to get banned over false charges.

Currently Thunderf00t is in a battle with DrCraigsVideos who uploads videos of Dr. William Lane Craig and keeps filling DMCA take down requests over any video where Thunderf00t is critical of Craig.

The whole reason I’m leaving Blogger is that under Google’s new policy one person could claim a blog violates their local laws and it’s blocked for that country. It doesn’t matter if it is actually illegal there and it could easily be argued that Google is being unethical in pandering to repressive regimes, but that’s what they’re creating. Essentially it’s doing to blogs what they’ve already done to YouTube. From what I’ve heard about AdSense policy violation charges and YouTube policy violation claims Google doesn’t practice a policy of innocent until proven guilty, they follow a policy of assumed guilt with no appeal.

We’re already in a world where the likes of VenomFangX and DrCraigsVideos can silence or attempt to silence people, all using legislation that is in theory supposed to protect people from copyright infringement, but in reality all intellectual property protection measures have the potential for great harm. SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA will just create a world where anyone can silence anyone else in the name of intellectual property.