By now, you’ve probably heard of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect I.P. Act (PIPA). These are anti-piracy bills that had been making their way through the House and Senate, respectively.

You might have been made aware of these proposed bills Wednesday, when Wikipedia and other Web sites “went dark” in protest. (Google covered up its logo with a big black rectangle, as though censored.)

Robert Galbraith/ReutersProtestors in San Francisco.

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I’ve been watching these doings with fascination. One reason: it’s the first time so many big Web sites have banded together for a political action. (Jenna Wortham in The New York Times offers a great analysis of this sea change here.)

But I’ve also been a little alarmed. Of the millions joining in outraged protests, I’ll bet that only a few have actually read the proposed bills. Everyone else is, no doubt, swept away by the Web sites’ shock language. These bills, say the opponents, will allow Hollywood to censor free speech, kill innovation, and “fatally damage the free and open Internet,” as Wikipedia put it. Light the torches! Grab the pitchforks!

In a perverse stroke of curiosity, I thought maybe I’d actually study these bills.

Nobody’s disputing that these bills have been put together by the entertainment industries — movies, TV, music. The bills are intended to address their chronic frustration: that most of the piracy sites, which make movies, TV, music and book files available free, are overseas. Even though they get more visits than Google or Wikipedia, American laws can’t touch them.

The SOPA and PIPA bills would try to shut down these overseas piracy sites by exerting leverage on companies here in the United States, where they do have jurisdiction.

For example, they’d force American service providers to block the domain names (for example, “piracy.com”) of overseas piracy sites. They’d allow the government to sue American sites like Google and Facebook, and even blogs, to remove links to the piracy sites. And they’d give the government the right to cut off the piracy sites’ funding; they could force forcing American payment companies (like PayPal) and advertisers to cut off the foreign accounts.

The outrage reminds me of the controversy over global warming. Yes, there are climate-change deniers. But nobody seems to notice that they’re in two totally different camps, making totally different arguments. Some people deny that there’s been any climate change at all. Others acknowledge the climate change, but deny that people have anything to do with it. These two categories of people actually aren’t on the same side at all.

In SOPA’s case, too, there are two groups. Some people are O.K. with the goals of the bills, acknowledging that software piracy is out of control; they object only to the bills’ approaches. If the entertainment industry’s legal arm gets out of control, they say, they could deem almost anything to be a piracy site. YouTube could be one, because lots of videos include bits of TV shows and copyrighted music. Facebook could be one, because people often link to copyrighted videos and songs. Google and Bing would be responsible for removing every link to a questionable Web site. Just a gigantic headache.

But there’s another group of people with a different agenda: They don’t even agree with the bills’ purpose. They don’t want their free movies taken away. A good number of them believe that free music and movies are their natural-born rights. They don’t want the big evil government taking away their free fun.

For the record, I think the movie companies have approached the digital age with almost slack-jawed idiocy. The rules for watching online movies from authorized sites are absurd (24 hours to finish the movie? Have they never heard of bedtime?). And there are plenty of movies, even big ones, that you can’t rent or stream online at all. (The original “Star Wars” trilogy, the first three “Indiana Jones” movies, and hundreds of others.)

It should occur to these movie studios that if you don’t give people a legal way to buy what they want, they’ll find another way to get it.

At the same time, what the piracy sites are doing doesn’t seem quite fair, either. Yes, it’s a quirk of the Internet that you can duplicate something infinitely and distribute it at no cost. But that doesn’t make it O.K. to shoplift, especially when the stolen goods are for sale at a reasonable price from legitimate sources. Yes, even if the company you’re robbing is huge, profitable and led by idiots.

In this case, the solution is to work on the language of the bills to rule out the sorts of abuses that the big Web sites fear. (And to fix the other minor point, which is that the bills won’t work. For example, they’d make American Internet companies block your access to domain names like “piracy.com,” but you’d still be able to get to them by typing their underlying numerical Internet addresses, like 197.12.34.56. In other words, anybody with any modicum of technical skills would easily sidestep the barriers.)

As it turns out, that’s exactly what’s happening. Dozens of members of Congress, and the White House itself, have dropped support of the bills; their sponsors are considering big changes to the proposals. (They might look, for starters, at the suggestions in Wednesday’s Times editorial: “The legislation could be further amended to narrow the definition of criminality and clarify that it is only aimed at foreign sites. And it could tighten guarantees of due process. Private parties must first get a court order to block business with a Web site they deem infringing on their copyrights.”)

In other words, the protests were effective. There’s no chance that the bills will become law in their current forms.

But it was a sloppy success; the scare language used by some of the Web sites was just as flawed as the Congressional language that they opposed. (I actually have sympathy — just a tiny bit — for the music business’s frustration. It was put nicely by Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America: “It’s very difficult to counter the misinformation when the disseminators also own the platform.”)

Finally, not enough people have acknowledged that the opposition was arguing two totally different different points — the “you’re going about it the wrong way” group and the “we want our illegal movies!” group.

In the new world of Internet versus government, the system worked; the people spoke, government listened, and that’s good. But let’s do it responsibly, people. Both sides have an obligation to do the right thing.