Both of those bills attempted to create new restrictions on speech. SOPA simply creates new censorship measures against forms of speech that are already illegal.
New censorship measures which a lot of people believe violate due process.
I can't quite decide which option would be better in the long run:
(a) stop SOPA, only to have similar ideas come up every single year, or
(b) let SOPA pass, then build a case and take it all the way to the Supreme Court hoping that measures such as SOPA would be ruled unconstitutional once and for all. If this succeeds, it would set a precedent to seriously discourage similar ideas from coming up again. The anti-SOPA camp definitely possesses the financial and legal resources to mount such a challenge, too. But it would take years, and there's no guarantee that the Supreme Court will be any more reasonable than Mr. Lamar Smith.
I can't quite decide which option would be better in the long run:
(a) stop SOPA, only to have similar ideas come up every single year, or
(b) let SOPA pass, then build a case and take it all the way to the Supreme Court hoping that measures such as SOPA would be ruled unconstitutional once and for all. If this succeeds, it would set a precedent to seriously discourage similar ideas from coming up again. The anti-SOPA camp definitely possesses the financial and legal resources to mount such a challenge, too. But it would take years, and there's no guarantee that the Supreme Court will be any more reasonable than Mr. Lamar Smith.