SOPA is a troubling bill, written and discussed by people with little understanding of the Internet who are influenced by other people who want to see total control over all content on it. Based on its wording, anyone can say that a web site is showing copyrighted material and have the government force that web site removed from DNS servers. It would effectively give studios the power to arbitrarily have web sites taken off the Internet with no consideration for fair use.

This is a very bad thing. However, there are some actions we can prepare if SOPA gets passed to take the bill and cram it right back down the throats of the studios, publishers, and associations who want that power. Let’s call it Studio Siege.

Copyright infringement is a two-way street, and any studio or publisher has some skeletons in its closet that can be turned back on it. Whether it’s a story  lifted whole cloth from someone else’s material, a riff taken from a song, a book passage quoted in a movie, or even just a screenshot of a movie or video game in the background, you can make the argument that studios engage in copyright infringement. At least, you can make the argument that studios engage in copyright infringement as far as the standards of SOPA reach, which is the point.

If SOPA passes, we should bring together every piece of plagiarism, every slip-up in attribution, every tiny mistake or cribbed material in content put out by movie, music, and game studios that support SOPA and report them. We hit them hard and fast with the same accusations that they could use to shut down fans’ and enthusiasts’ web sites.

Bombard studios’ web sites with allegations of using sound-alikes to copyrighted music, quoting passages of copyrighted texts, and showing things on TV and computer screens that are the intellectual property of other people. Turn the weapons they fought for on them and make them want to get SOPA pulled as fast as possible.

If you’re a copyright holder or produced any intellectual property that could be said to be unjustly used by studios, that makes the argument that much stronger. If it’s your song, your story, your game, your idea, you could be the greatest weapon we have.

Studios with tenuous ties to copyright infringement are, legitimately, more guilty of trying to profit on copyrighted materials than fan sites and online reviewers, because they actively make money on a large scale for every piece of work that has a tiny copyright slip-up. The argument can be made that they are profiting from material that’s not theirs and is not used under the ideas of fair use, which means removing them from the Internet is more justified under SOPA than the fans’ and enthusiasts’ sites that could be hurt by this law.

If SOPA passes, we can stuff the system with so many accusations to take down the web sites of studios, publishers, and associations that pushed for it that their tunes will change really fast.