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Unbelievable. Can't even get the fucking acronyms right.

SOPA is the "Stop Online Piracy Act". SOPA expanded criminal liability for copyright infringement and provided new tools for rightsholders to shut down suspected infringing services.

The executive order discussed in the WaPo article regards CISPA. CISPA has nothing at all to do with SOPA. CISPA would have allowed providers extended protection from civil liability if they shared information about network attacks with other providers and with the government; equally importantly, CISPA allowed the government to share information about network attacks with providers, which is something it has no effective way of lawfully doing now.

CISPA has so little to do with copyright and piracy that the draft of CISPA that the House passed explicitly exempted IPR breaches of all sorts from the mechanism. But that doesn't stop the Internet from rolling all these policy issues into a single ball and yelling at it.

The EO Obama signed does even less than CISPA; an EO can't provide liability shields to private companies. Mostly, the new EO just tells the various federal bureaucracies to pretend to that they're actually doing something to improve the security of our swiss-cheesed government IT systems.

It's fairly clear the SOPA/CISPA anger was a lot of bandwagoning when many of the opponents don't even know what it said.
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