Republicans, Democrats, Google

Ed Black of the Computer and Communications Industry Association followed Lofgren. "One of the key components of the industry that has allowed it to flourish is that it is the messenger," Black explained. "We believe in the concept of 'don't kill the messenger.'"

Any rightsholder could cut off the financial lifeblood of services just as search engines, user-generated content platforms, social media, and cloud-based storage unless those services actively monitor and police user activity to the rightsholder's satisfaction. A mere accusation by any rightsholder would be sufficient to require payment systems and ad networks to terminate doing business with the service; the accused service's only recourse would be to send a counter-notice, at which point it would be at the networks' discretion whether to reinstate the service's access to payments and advertising. This would bypass and effectively overturn the basic framework of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, by pushing user-driven sites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to implement ever-more elaborate monitoring systems to 'confirm,' to the satisfaction of the most aggressive and litigious rightsholder, whether individual users are exchanging infringing content.

Signed—groups who often disagree with each other, among them TechFreedom, Public Knowledge, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Demand Progress, and the Center for Democracy and Innovation.

Meanwhile, the Brookings Institution has published a position paper that carefully spells out what research experts have been saying for months, that the DNS filtering/redirecting provisions in both the Senate's IP PROTECT Act and SOPA are the wrong way to defend copyrights.

How big is the opposition to SOPA

How big is the opposition to SOPA and IP Protect? Just count the number of signers to statements released on Monday. A petition by innovation companies to the House Judiciary Committee includes Facebook, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Google. A letter from human rights groups includes international groups from India's Center for Internet and Society to the Church of Sweden. The three major US consumer groups have sent in an opposition statement.

"At a time of continued economic uncertainty, this legislation will result in fewer new businesses, fewer new investments, and fewer new jobs," they contend. SOPA would "cause serious and long term damage to the research industry, one of the few bright spots in our economy."