The Trap You Didn’t Set
Picture a small blog about cooking, science, or local history. Running for years, it has accumulated thousands of reader comments. Somewhere in that archive, a visitor once posted a link to a news article. That URL was later bought by a company running pirated content. The blog owner never saw the comment, never clicked the link, never benefited from it. Under a particular reading of two bills moving through the U.S. Congress in early 2012, they could still be on the wrong side of the law.
The bills were SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261, introduced October 26, 2011) and PIPA (the PROTECT IP Act, S. 968, introduced May 12, 2011). Their backers, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the film and music industries, framed them as tools to pursue foreign “rogue websites” peddling counterfeit goods and pirated entertainment. The problem was in the details.
What These Bills Were Actually Trying to Do
The stated target was a real irritation: websites operating beyond U.S. copyright law’s reach, freely offering pirated films, music, and software. Both bills proposed blocking their domain names through internet service providers, severing advertiser and payment-processor relationships, and barring search engines from linking to them. The intention was to aim at clearly bad actors abroad. What critics noticed was that the language didn’t stay that narrow.
How a Comment Section Becomes a Legal Minefield
Critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, outlets like Gizmodo, and the Reddit team, flagged this mechanism: under a broad reading of SOPA and PIPA’s text, linking to a page hosting infringing content would itself count as a violation. Not uploading. Not profiting. Linking.
Most sites accepting public comments accept whatever users type, including hyperlinks. But there is a second layer: content behind a URL can change long after someone posts it. A commenter might share a link in 2009 to a legitimate article; by 2011, that same URL could redirect to a site distributing pirated movies. The old comment sits unchanged while its destination has shifted into legally problematic territory. The site owner now hosts a violation they had no way of knowing about and couldn’t have prevented. Critics described the resulting compliance task as essentially unworkable.
The Numbers Behind the Problem
Neatorama, a popular curiosity blog, published a piece on January 18, 2012 explaining why the bills concerned them directly. At that point the site had accumulated nearly 40,000 posts and over 311,000 comments, each potentially containing links, each link requiring verification and continuous re-verification as destinations changed hands. Scale that to any platform hosting millions of user-generated posts and the monitoring burden becomes unmanageable. The compliance cost alone, critics argued, could make allowing public comments financially untenable without a single lawsuit ever being filed.
A Word on What Was Actually Certain
The “linking equals liability” interpretation was advanced by critics; it was not the only possible legal reading, and coverage from January 2012 did not fully resolve whether existing safe-harbor protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would apply or be overridden. What penalties a blog owner might actually face was never clearly spelled out. Whether events would have played out as critics described, had either bill passed, is a question that never got answered in court.
January 18, 2012
On January 18, 2012, English Wikipedia blacked out its content for 24 hours, the first time in the site’s history. Thousands of other websites protested alongside it. Google blacked out its logo and linked to a petition. Wikipedia’s SOPA protest page was viewed 9,716,454 times that day alone.
In the days that followed, multiple congressional co-sponsors withdrew support from both bills, including Senator Marco Rubio, an original PIPA co-sponsor. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid postponed a floor vote scheduled for January 24, 2012. The House Judiciary Committee chairman postponed plans to advance SOPA on January 20, 2012. Neither bill became law.
The argument that drove all of it was a fairly technical point about who bears responsibility for a hyperlink they didn’t post, pointing to a page they never visited. Most legislative battles don’t hinge on details like that. This one did.