As most people know, Dodd has devoted his recent hours — when not swanning around at the Golden Globes — to seeking the passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act, legislation that inspires such widespread revulsion that a whole bunch of major and minor websites went dark Wednesday in protest.

Dodd called the blackout a "dangerous" tactic and an "an abuse of power." To see this as anything more than the disgraceful posturing of a well-paid shill, you'd have to believe that society was somehow endangered by the absence of reddit.com. The biggest hole punched in the Internet was the blackout of Wikipedia, but how was that dangerous? Because people had to go look up things from original sources?

What's more, Wikipedia is offered to all without charge, mostly though volunteer efforts. Somehow, according to Dodd, shutting it down for a day violates some unspoken social covenant.

SOPA shuddered to a stop late Wednesday as key senators pulled out their support, despite having been co-sponsors. Their comments suggested they hadn't quite understood the bill they were co-sponsoring.

I won't pretend to understand it either, despite quite a lot of time spent trying. Here is what I will say. Almost since the dawn of the Internet, big entertainment companies have understandably resented the way their content flows up onto sites like YouTube. They also don't like the current model for dealing with this, which requires them to catch it and complain about it.

Hence Viacom's billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube, even though the latter was obediently scrubbing off Paramount movies and Sponge Bob episodes whenever the former asked them to.

Not good enough. The entertainment industry is in a protracted battle — bigger than any single piece of legislation — to make Internet companies afraid of what would happen if copyright-infringing content turned up on their sites. Forty-eight hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Making sure that info-typhoon includes no episodes of Viacom's TV show"I Just Want My Pants Back"is a daunting problem.

SOPA men like Dodd claim the legislation is aimed only at offshore sites, but the language of the bill makes it seem easier for a company like Viacom to prevail against YouTube or — even more likely — against whatever the next YouTube is.

Meanwhile Dodd took his case to the airwaves on television's single most overrated "news" program "Morning Joe," a daily bazaar of Beltway harlotry unconvincingly dressed up as journalism.