Last week, several Internet sites protested against two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, that would take a heavy-handed approach to preventing copyright infringement. Though the movement was led by left-leaning technology sites, the SOPA/PIPA kerfuffle has the potential to demonstrate why conservative principles are important.

The problem with SOPA and PIPA was their broad scope. The bills went beyond primary infringers to impose criminal penalties on search engines and service providers that linked to infringing domain names.