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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty empty rant. Nothing about SOPA/PIPA is the product of the government overstepping its Constitutional powers. Whatever else it might be, the internet is a medium of interstate commerce, squarely within Congress's power to regulate. Moreover, the regulation in question concerns a property right created by the Constitution itself.

There are certain due process, etc, arguments you can make at the edges, but the fundamental idea of SOPA/PIPA are squarely Constitutional.

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> the internet is a medium of interstate commerce

Only in part. Only downloaded goods use the internet as a medium for commerce. The rest of the time, it's for communication (speech).

Commerce is legal jargon which doesn't carry the same meaning as regular English. You're misinterpreting it because you're not treating it in its legal context.

There is no magical legal context. What you're referring to is people being dishonest and trying to cheat and get away with violating the constitution by pretending words mean different things. For instance, the power to "regulate" is not the power to ban, though politicians and judges have pretended it is, and many people have been tricked into believing it.

violating property rights and free speech is certainly overstepping

The constitution does not give the federal government the power to limit interstate commerce, only the power to prevent states from imposing tariffs on it.

The regulations in question allow the government to censor websites, something that they are not given the power to do in the establishment clause, and are also strictly forbidden from doing in the first amendment.

If the bills simply entailed the power to require websites to take down IP violating content, then what you say would be true.

The fundamental ideas are not constitutional. I suggest you read the constitution. (Seriously, it was meant to be read. It doesn't take lawyers or judges to interpret it, it is written in pretty plain language.)

> not given the power to do in the establishment clause

What does a prohibition on establishing a national religion have to do with DNS blocking? Perhaps metaphorically, unlimited-copyright is the religion of many politicians, but legally that seems like a stretch...

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