Oh god: "Why not hire some whiz kids?"
What a goddamned fool.
"We have the brainpower in this country [to design a machine to distinguish copyrighted works from non-copyrighted works]."
Actually, no, we don't. Fair use is a thing, holmes.
Certainly frustrating.
Leaving aside the question of whether such a thing could exist ("return true" works pretty well for a first approximation, but presumably the senator meant "copyrighted and used without permission"), anyone with the brainpower to do that hopefully has the brainpower not to.
We do? As a non-technical senator, you can make that engineering claim with confidence?
The woman from Google was brilliantly concise, and her explanations made absolutely perfect sense. They were countered with "horse is out of the barn" type popularisms, volkish garbage from ignorant senators to their totally illiterate constituency.
So much for the last pocket of growth in the American economy; it's gonna be shut down, destroyed. Smarties need to think countermeasures, and let these idiots root around in their own shite for a few years learning that they shouldn't deign to dictate what their betters have the "brainpower" to solve if they themselves can't figure out how.