Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

judiciary.house.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 269 posts

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#111

Post by codyrobbins »

mmaunder wrote: post #92

10:45am mountain time: Ted Poe (R-TX): "This panel or this committee is made up of former prosecutors, defense lawyers and there are even two former judges here." Consider the conflict of interest that exists when lawyers are making our laws. In this case if this bill passes there will be more laws and legal complexity and consequently more work to go around for everyone on the panel and all their previous and curren…

You’re joking, right? Who would you propose is more qualified to draft the word of the actual laws than lawyers? What lawyers are at their essence are experts in law—the word ‘lawyer’ even has the word ‘law’ in it.

It's like asking a team of developers to get together and vote on whether a problem is best solved by writing more code or doing nothing.

Who would you ask whether code needs to be written, then? The lawyers who aren’t dealing in law? Housewives? Veterinarians?

It’s the same thing with lobbyists—they end up getting hired by government because they are experts in what they are talking about. You’re going to be very hard-pressed to find an expert that doesn’t have some vested interest somewhere in what they’re talking about.

Consider the conflict of interest that exists…

A common tactic I see when people argue about politics is that because someone could be doing something corrupt then it means that they then therefore are doing it. I could certainly go walk outside and push someone in front of a bus right now, but assuming I’m a murderer just because I could is not a good assumption. Conflicts of interest certainly raise the possibility of wrongdoing and should be scrutinized, but the simple existence of a conflict of interest is not proof of wrongdoing; for that you need not aspersions but, well, proof.

I am staunchly against SOPA being enacted without industry input, and I think it’s misguided to try to prop up dying content businesses that aren’t innovating, but spouting conspiracy theories about the politicians passing it for their own benefit isn’t going to help.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#112

Post by feralchimp »

Sorry for not attributing all these...exchange is between a Rep whose nameplate isn't vieible and multiple witnesses, primarily Ms. Oyama.

"We have harshly criticized governments whose service providers monitor and censor the actions of their users. [...] How would this legislation affect our diplomacy with nations like Iran, for example?"

"When there are realtime events, it's important that content services allow for infrastructure to support realtime public response to those events."

"This bill hurts both large and small content intermediaries severely, but in different ways."

"We've seen Libyan officials trying to take rivals' YouTube channels out of their national internet stream."

"The Justice Department has new responsibilities under SOPA while at the same time we've been talking about downsizing government. Are we creating an unmeetable burden for U.S. Gov as well as content intermediaries?"

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#113

Post by feralchimp »

Chair: "I came to this meeting undecided on this bill, and hoping to make up my mind during this discussion, but this discussion is bringing up concerns (e.g. interference with DNSSec) that seem highly problematic. Can the panelists comment on whether this bill would dis-incentivize adoption of more secure standards like DNSSec?"

"We disagree." - big content shill

Chair: "If you believe these concerns are unfounded, please submit written responses to that specific question explaining why you believe that."..."I'm very concerned that these [DNSSec] experts are not part of this hearing!"

Yes bro!

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#114

Post by libraryatnight »

kijin wrote: post #84
[deleted] wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> the music industry is hemorrhaging money [citation required]

That's what I was going to ask. Many papers I find sifting through looking for evidence supporting this, actually refute this claim. So I'm curious what sources this poster is using.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#115

Post by nissimk »

kijin wrote: post #84
[deleted] wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> the music industry is hemorrhaging money [citation required]

Here's a citation arguing that pirated content has no impact on DVD sales "With respect to the impact of piracy on sales, we use the television broadcast as an exogenous demand shock and find that the availability of pirated content at the time of broadcast has no effect on post broadcast DVD sales gains.":

http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~rtelang/SmithTelang.pdf

These guys say that pre-release pirated movies result in a 15% decline in box office revenue "We estimate that the net effect of pre-release piracy is approximately a 15% reduction in box office sales.":

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1782924

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#116

Post by feralchimp »

Reps now bitching that Google's senior management is not in the room. FUCK YOU, SENATOR. Those people deliver more value per day than you will deliver in your entire career as a public servant.

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.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#117

Post by mmaunder »

codyrobbins wrote: post #111
mmaunder wrote: post #92

10:45am mountain time: Ted Poe (R-TX): "This panel or this committee is made up of former prosecutors, defense lawyers and there are even two former judges here." Consider the conflict of interest that exists when lawyers are making our laws. In this case if this bill passes there will be more laws and legal complexity and consequently more work to go around for everyone on the panel and all their previous and curren…

You’re joking, right? Who would you propose is more qualified to draft the word of the actual laws than lawyers? What lawyers are at their essence are experts in law—the word ‘lawyer’ even has the word ‘law’ in it. It's like asking a team of developers to get together and vote on whether a problem is best solved by writing more code or doing nothing. Who would you ask whether code needs to be written, then? The lawye…

Actually this is an established theory. Here's Dr Clifford Winston, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution chatting to Prof. Russ Roberts of George Mason University about the conflict of interest when lawyers make our laws. They also cover the bar system maintaining artificial scarcity among lawyers, thereby inflating legal fees.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/09/winston_on_lawy.htm...

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#118

Post by danielsoneg »

mdwrigh2 wrote: post #45
nextparadigms wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also heavyweights like Microsoft who are sponsoring the bill. My guess is there are still more money being invested to make this a reality than otherwise.

Do you have a source for that info? A quick Google search turns up nothing on Microsoft's stance on SOPA.

Microsoft's pro-PROTECT IP [1], though I don't think they've made a statement on SOPA yet. They are, though, as pointed out, a member of the BSA, which is very pro-SOPA.

1: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#119

Post by sp332 »

ukgent wrote: post #25
feralchimp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about the Firefox plugin to workaround site blocking now... popcorn ...

FoxyProxy!

No, that only works against blocking traffic. SOPA would remove the DNS entry from the .COM domain. It's an attack at the DNS level so using a proxy won't work. You'd need something like the MAFIAFire plugin to keep a "shadow" DNS going.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#120

Post by jlind »

feralchimp wrote: post #116

Reps now bitching that Google's senior management is not in the room. FUCK YOU, SENATOR. Those people deliver more value per day than you will deliver in your entire career as a public servant. 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 th…

And then cutting off the answer when it's exactly what he doesn't want to hear.

Certainly frustrating.

Post reply on HN