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Comment by jerfelix | Hacker News Reader

It's great to see the EFF, the Free Software Foundation, and other big freedom fighters opposing this bill. (See http://americancensorship.org/ ).

But are any of the big corporations fighting it? Google / YouTube? Microsoft? Apple? Come on guys! Step up! (or am I just missing their statements on this bad bill?)

I think a "Stop Censorship" black banner across the Google logo tomorrow would go a long way toward defeating this.

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Sad testament to the state of the policy making process in this country that the most we can hope for to stop one terrible piece of legislation advanced by corporations to further theirs interests is for another set of corporations to oppose it to further their diverging interests.

Is it really sad? Corporations wield a lot of power; that's why we built them. What would be sad is if they fail to stand up for our interests.

And then we might have to do something about it.

It is. Corporations exist for the purpose of maximizing their own profits. Government policy making should be about maximizing the people's well being. These might sometimes be related ends, but they're far from being the same thing.

From http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s968/money

Specific orgs supporting the bill: Microsoft, CBS, MLB, NBA, NFL, Disney, Bose, Nike, etc, etc.

Specific orgs opposed to the bill: Google, Yahoo, VISA, AmEx, and some foundations, groups, non-profits...but that's it.

I don't get why Pfizer, Adidas etc are supporting this. What do they gain out of this?

Counterfeits, possibly? I believe a lot of counterfeits are sold online and those companies might be interested in trying to get rid of those.

My take is that SOPA is about a great deal more than digital goods. The global economy has enormous minor/innocent IP infringement as well as blatant copying. Companies want to circumvent tradition legal approaches to protecting their IP and it looks like they may get it.

Grey market goods? Currently these big companies fight a losing battle trying to secure their distribution to only authorised dealers. I would assume this bill would make it a lot easier for them to get sites they don't want trading their goods shut down.

.. why is Microsoft supporting this bill...?

They stand to gain more from IP enforcement than lose to the false positives and business opportunities.

Also, perhaps more cynically, it stands to do very serious harm to Google.

Google is fighting it. It threatens both Youtube and Google search. I haven't seen them fighting it in public, though. But they should fight it openly and try to gather more support.

There are reports of Google and Yahoo leaving or threatening to leave the US Chamber of Commerce (a private lobbying organization, btw) because of its stance on certain legislation:

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/11/04/361469/google-le...

http://www.fixtheuschamber.org/tracking-the-chamber/yahoo-jo...

Interesting progression of events in the last 15 years, given that anti-piracy legislation was originally written to protect software companies.

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