Jonathan Zittrain has produced an excellent legal critique of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). His conclusion is:

Others have weighed in on why SOPA makes for poor public policy and is an ill-considered technical intervention. In this paper we’ve hewed closely to simply reviewing it as legal doctrine. On those terms, its vague language and undue granting of law-like powers to private parties without sufficient public protections make it worthy of a firm “no” vote. SOPA is both overly strong and overly broad; overly strong in the collection of remedies provided, and overly broad for the problems it is attempting to take on.

LATER: Chinese bloggers see SOPA as “the Great Firewall of America”. Who said irony was dead?