I rarely make New Year’s Resolutions…they are far too easy to ignore on January 2nd. But this year I did think it would be a great idea to blog more, posting more podcasts of Old-Radio Shows and sharing my pearls of wisdom about arcane subjects no one cares about.

Well, that worked out well.

But as I desperately hold on to the Winter Holidays for the last remaining days (we celebrate Christmas here, and the tree is starting to lose its needles), I’m looking around for a Christmas show to run this weekend, just to remind everyone that the holidays are more a frame of mind than a calendar date, and awesomeness doesn’t need to be limited to only a week or two at the end of the year.

The podcast, sparse as it might be, might not last much longer, though. If the Congress of the United States decides to pass the terrible bills SOPA and ProtectIP, anyone with a burr in their saddle could shut down pretty much any website, turning off the DNS and in the extreme taking away the domain name…much of this without the need for anything so trivial as a judge.

We’ll ignore my feeling that “intellectual property” doesn’t exist (the framers of the Constitution were very careful to separate out property and copyright). We’ll ignore that the rest of the world must look at the U.S. as a bunch of thugs who believe we can completely control the Internet, like some gang demanding protection money from the shop-holders on a street. No, my objections to this set of bills written in toto by the entertainment industry is simpler than that.

It won’t work, and will cause havoc on the Internet.

Look, I’ve been working in IT (Information Technologies) since the 1980’s (using a VAX and a Bitnet-to-Internet gateway to get information from the Net!), and over the years have needed to go to…less than savory corners of the Internet for information and sometimes hacks to get clients’ machines working again. While certainly no expert, I do know how to get around the minimal and silly restrictions these bills detail; now imagine how trivial getting around these restrictions would be for your usual fourteen-year-old kid. Nope, if someone wants to share a copy of Harry Potter and the Milking of the Movie-going Public, they will, and this bill ain’t gonna stop ‘em.

No, but it might cause people to be attacked by the Industry for posting videos of their children’s birthday party if “that song” is in it, or a podcast like this one because of some obscure theme song. Right now, there is a financial cost to taking serious action against a website or family, which would (by design) be eliminated by these bills.

The most reasoned dissection of these bills and their likely effect on the Net is in this TechDirt article. Take a moment and read it (you can skip the comments, which tend to be…er…less considered and measured), and then take another moment to contact your congrescritters today and point them to that article.

And once you’ve done that, grab a glass of egg nog and hum softly a holiday song. You’ll feel much better, I promise.