SOPA sponsors break their own laws

I've heard this response, but I'm not convinced that this explanation really changes the issue substantially, or exonerates the Congressmen in question. As it stands, willful infringement must be proven to land any meaningful award in a copyright case. (A recent example http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/jammie-thoma...)

So while factually accurate, I don't entirely see how it minimizes the damage caused by SOPA, as the copyright holders have never had much difficulty demonstrating willful infringement to date.

A member of the legislature should be held to higher standards than the general public; don't just obey the letter of the law but obey the spirit of the law. This isn't irrelevancies about a person's past or private life, it is directly related to what they're pushing onto other people.

> He also pointed out Smith and his colleagues would only be liable if the value of the streaming performances exceeds $1,000, and it's not clear how valuable a few short clips of local news broadcasts are.

Is the value for the owners, or for the use that the "infringer" gets from them?

What is even more worrying for me, and the way I understand SOPA (note that my understand comes exclusively from reading the news, mostly Hacker News, I haven't read the law), is the fact that copyright holders can cause a website to be "banned" from the internet (i.e. domain unresolvable, deleted from Google, funding cut) without any proof. So, in this case, the whole congressman's website could be "put offline", and fair use/willful infringement wouldn't even matter - unless, later, the congressman would decide to challenge the action in a court of law.

I would assume that somebody who participated in the implementation of a law and then broke it, would be the last person to be able to invoke a good-faith belief that their actions are legal.

Telling is the use of words such as "unlikely", "not clear", "probably". This bill is vague enough that we won't actually know its effects until 10 years of litigation have established precedent. Not a great environment for doing business.

I'm not a satirist, and this is not TV, but:

congressman: Good day, sheeple. With prompting by the content industry, we are considering beheading everyone, because it has been shown that everyone sometimes plays back a tune in their head without paying royalties. We've tried to get you to admit and pay every time you do that, but that didn't work, and we have to do something -- it seems only beheading would solve the problem.

(people frantically writing letters)

congressman: Seems, from everyone's responses, we've gone too far. We've asked our content industry overlords, and they will apparently be ok if we only cut everyone's ears to start with, so that no infringing content can get into people's heads. But if that doesn't work well for music, we're not just going to take your eyes out to avoid infringing on videos -- we'll have to do the full beheading thing then.

(people sighing with relief) Well, that's a reasonable measure.

--

At least, that's my impression of the effectiveness of writing these letters. Congress just keeps introducing horrible bills, and the people have to win every time (which they hardly ever do), because every one of these bills includes the cumulative effect of the previously failed-to-pass bills.

EDIT: prompted->prompting, out->eyes

No, the underlying sentiment is that copyright holders (especially the big conglomerates) have gone significantly too far with the rights granted to them by the people.

That's not necessarily true. If you look at the corporate or organizational opposition to SOPA, you'll find eff.org, mozilla.org, etc. These folk aren't necessarily in favor of piracy. More realistically, they're in favor of free speech or free software.

If the principles behind SOPA were applied to other things,

- police would close gardening shops if someone says they saw a client bought anything that was later used to grow pot

- pharmacies would be shut down by the police for selling syringes if someone says one of these was used for drugs

- gun producers would be shut down for selling guns if one of them was said to have been used to commit a crime.

And if you think "well, in theory, but of course it isn't going to be used like that" - well, it definitely IS going to be used like that. DMCA is being used like that (and part of the reasons SOPA is being introduced is because DMCA has some fairness provisions that make it harder to abuse , even though it is very easy to use ).

Also, PATRIOT act was for terrorists, and wouldn't be used for anything else, right? That's why 99% of the times it was used have nothing to do with terrorism.

SOPA is designed to be abused the way those people cry about. Make no mistake. And you'll suffer its consequences like the rest of wolf criers, even if you wouldn't know it.

I agree. You really should look into SOPA though. The bill is dangerous in that it can be abused to shut down legit sites with hardly any evidence for infringement at all.

That said, I agree with your sentiment about the piracy supporters. A lot of people like to rant about freedom this and freedom that but it just doesn't hold up when you talk about piracy. There are a plethora of sites that do just blatantly rip off content producers, often times bragging about it (looking your way, Pirate Bay), while at the same time hiding behind the ideals of freedom.

No one will argue that the net is powerful and it's the freedom of the Internet that's a huge part of its power to empower people but we cannot sit and pretend that these sites should be left alone because that would hurt freedom. Yes, we do need to protect freedom for and on the Internet but using the freedom defense to argue for some of these sites is just ridiculous.

If I produce a piece of data that I charge for and it gets distributed freely on these sites without my authorization that is just plain wrong. No one is entitled to free music, movies, software, etc. they're just not unless it was the original intent of the author to give it away freely. This is real simple stuff and I can't see how people defend piracy like this. "oh but the corporations are evil, they lock me in, restrict my freedom, whine whine, moan, moan". Well you don't have to purposely hurt them or "take them down" just because you believe software, audio, video, whatever should be free. What you do is either use the alternatives made by like minded folks or create your own. Why force an agenda on the rest of us? That's extremism.

SOPA is a bad law and I'm ardently oppossed to it but let's not frame this issue like the poor underdog torrent/file sharing sites are championing freedom and good while the evil corporations are trying to enslave us all. It's just not so (at least in those terms, arguably). Piracy is illegal and has been since before the Internet. What part of distributing paid content on a worldwide scale for free is okay? This isn't about your belief that you're entitled to x, y, and z free. Its about this big "evil" corporations wanting to get paid when you use their product. They obviously are making things people want and enjoy otherwise it wouldn't be piracy that put them out of business, it'd be lack of sales and no one would even want to pirate their product, whatever the product may be.

There's too much talk about the obviously unethical file sharing sites. They're no angels themselves. So instead of framing it in their terms we should be framing it like this:

In an effort to stop piracy (which is not a bad thing) these large corporations and government officials are supporting a bill that has obvious potential for abuse and can hurt legit business owners or content providers in the process. The bill is over-reaching and can hurt future innovation.

Let's talk in those terms instead of defending known violators of existing laws.

While I see your point, I don't think it's fair to chalk up the opposition to merely piracy supporters. There are a large number of people who fear the broader ramifications, and a lot of organizations, who are against SOPA and not necessarily pirates.