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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?

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

I believe it's neither, but rather the value that the owner asserts (and can get a court to agree with). A single copy of a single song isn't worth $1,000, but I believe recent RIAA suits have valued songs as such. Who's to say a few short clips of local news broadcasts aren't worth as much?

Yeah, I can see your point but this too feels like its really reaching for something that's just not there. They should be held to a higher standard but our strong opinions about SOPA seem to be blocking our ability to look at this realistically.

The example in the post can be compared to any one of us embedding a video on a personal site or blog. It's really obvious the guy isn't willfully infringing. We can be technical and argue semantics all day but in the end there really is a big difference between a representative supporting legislation we disagree with possibly technically violating that same legislation with a seemingly innocent video embed and a website that provides a search feature allowing you to access hundreds of thousands of copyrighted files. Big difference.

There is definitely a point to be made about the alleged hypocrisy but in the end nit-picking little things like this and arguing semantics comes off as petty to people and could really do more harm to the opponents of SOPA than good.

> there really is a big difference between a representative supporting legislation we disagree with possibly technically violating that same legislation with a seemingly innocent video embed and a website that provides a search feature allowing you to access hundreds of thousands of copyrighted files. Big difference.

Existing law has been misused, as mentioned in other places in the thread.

There's nothing to say that this law will not be similarly misused.

See, for example, the fact that Google has digital-finger-printing to prevent copyright material being used, even if it's legitimately being used under Fair Use.

Yeah, I agree the law's been misused and SOPA will almost certainly be misused to. My point is that this argument over the representative is kind of petty. This shouldn't be about who's doing what and who's got some double standard. Instead the discussion should just focus on the bill on its own and framing the discussion like has been done in the post makes our side (yeah, our side, for some reason people think I'm for SOPA) look petty or like we've run out of good arguments.

No.

Demonstrating that some people are willing to use weird law to enforce copyright protection, and that some of those people do not understand existing copyright law themselves, is a useful exercise.

The point is to use their language to show how daft the law could be. That's maybe why it feels petty to you, because it is a stupid thing, but it's a stupid thing that they could well end up criminalizing. The politicians talk of "thieves" and "criminals" and "crooks". Using their language it is wrong for someone to have stolen content on their homepage.

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.

in this case, the whole congressman's website could be "put offline"

But, judging from past DOJ actions, it won't just be lamarsmith.house.gov that's taken offline. It'll be the whole house.gov domain!

You say that like it's a bad thing!

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.

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.

I agree with this, but the factual inaccuracy is important. Given that these sites are run by the bill sponsors it would be pretty easy to show they are not willful infringes.

Worse, by publishing this story it makes SOPA easier to defend - the authors can get up and say "look - SOPA won't wreck the internet. I made a mistake and did the wrong thing, and the law explicitly took that into account"

Isn't a potential solution to the question of willful infringement as simple as notifying the Congressperson's office of the problem? If they continue to host the content, they cannot claim ignorance anymore.

That may be true, but there is still fair-use.

In any event Fair Use is an affirmative defense, not a right written into SOPA.

So the only "fair use" component to this discussion is "no, the legislators may never suffer criminal penalties... but they still are at risk of having their domain removed from the internet until they can convince the censors to reinstate it."

And each new piece of media posted to their site opens the operator up to another round of "censored until proven innocent".

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.

That's very naive. It would be that someone's staffer who broke the law, that staffer having the good faith belief, and the representative would have good faith belief in his staffer. By the transitive property of good faith belief among people in politics, that would make them all clean.

However, when your 8 year old daughter who shared an Miley Bieber mp3 had good faith belief she was ok because everyone is doing -- that is untrustworthy, and the fact that you have good faith belief in her intentions does not clear you of anything. You'll go to jail or pay a hefty sum.

That's how laws really work. Not the way they common knowledge assumes.

Technically, the way the law works is based on what a jury is willing to accept. As I would not accept the first interpretation and I would accept the second it's something of a grey area.

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.