SOPA/PIPA: What and why

[Cin]

Interesting info in regards to piracy:

Numbers Cited By SOPA Supporters May Be Fictitious
Sacrilege's picture
Submitted by Sacrilege on 01/18/2012 18:16 -0500

Ignoring, momentarily, that the U.S. has already adopted international law which seeks to curtail online piracy (see, e.g., DMCA), and that these new bills seek to do little more than enact what amounts to police powers over foreign companies, it looks like the studies cited in support of piracy-gone-rampant may have never have existed. Julian Sanchez, a researcher at the Cato Institute, did his level best at tracking down the research behind the near-absurd numbers (the industry claims nearly $250B lost in revenues a year, and 750,000 lost jobs), but instead found only circular references.

So then, you may be asking yourself: how much does piracy actually cost the entertainment industry? $89MM. What’s the U.S. Taxpayer cost to enact new legislation (SOPA)? $47MM, by Sanchez’s estimates. That's 52.8 cents of U.S. Taxpayer money spent for every dollar in private enterprise saved, if the system works (which it won't), when there already likely exists a private remedy (private action in the host country).

From the GAO:

“First, a number of industry, media, and government publications have cited an FBI estimate that U.S. businesses lose $200-$250 billion to counterfeiting on an annual basis. This estimate was contained in a 2002 FBI press release, but FBI officials told us that it has no record of source data or methodology for generating the estimate and that it cannot be corroborated.

Second, a 2002 CBP press release contained an estimate that U.S. businesses and industries lose $200 billion a year in revenue and 750,000 jobs due to counterfeits of merchandise. However, a CBP official stated that these figures are of uncertain origin, have been discredited, and are no longer used by CBP. A March 2009 CBP internal memo was circulated to inform staff not to use the figures. However, another entity within DHS continues to use them.”

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/number...-be-fictitious

[Kobi]

Yesterday's internet-wide protest may not have killed Congress's anti-piracy efforts completely, but a lot of legislators (including some co-sponsors) suddenly can't run away from the bills fast enough. According to Ars Technica's count, 18 Senators, mostly Republican, have withdrawn their support for the Protect IP Act in the last 24 hours, including seven former co-sponsors. Roy Blunt of Missouri (pictured), is another one of the co-sponsors who turned on the bill, following Marco Rubio's lead. Most are now calling PIPA "flawed" or "not ready for prime time," but since they didn't seem to feel that way on Tuesday, it's pretty clear that Wednesday's public protests have had at least some of their desired effect.

Oddly enough, the defectors are skewing heavily Republican, though perhaps it shouldn't be that surprising since the architects of the bill are mostly media corporations that tend to be more left leaning. (As is Christopher Dodd, the current head of the Motion Picture Association of American, who used to be a Democratic Senator.) The truth is that the legislation is one of the few movements to not be divided evenly along party lines, but anti-SOPA opposition did get key endorsements from the Heritage Foundation and RedState.com.

The bills have not been completely taken off the table yet, but support is definitely waning and we may soon see a bipartisan effort to put them down for good. At the very least, they're both going to need some script doctoring before they find their way to the House and Senate floors.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/natio...lackout/47592/

[Linus]

What was interesting was that 3 of the sponsors were found to have copyrighted material on their websites --- without approval from the artist (as per the Rachel Maddow clip I saw last night). While their levels would not be enough to violate SOPA, the principle, IMO, is what they violated.