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SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

judiciary.house.gov

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Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#231
post #128

This is SO OFFENSIVE!!! She gives such great, clear technical answers -- they can detect child porn by a combination of reverse image search analysis and manual checks, but they can't visually tell whether a movie or song is licensed to play. Makes sense. "I'm sure we have the technology, we have the brainpower," responds some congrasshole. What fucking idiots these people are. They don't have a right to dictate term…

His response to her explanation about how they don't have the technology was "Google does have the technology". These people are all idiots.

This makes no sense especially given that even a human observer could not tell instantly just by looking at a piece of content whether the content is properly licensed. As others have said, there no reasonable way to 100% correctly detect and filter restricted or copyrighted content based purely on the content itself.

Just look at the mess that is the patent system... even "experts" in a field or art are making huge mistakes when it comes to judging obviousness and originality. Why do people think a machine will do as well, let alone better when trying to judge legality of a piece of content?

I think what it comes down to is the content industries wanting to force technology companies to fight piracy for them. Technology companies know that trying to fight something like this (past a certain point) just leads to an arms race with huge amounts of collateral damage on either side. Media companies are throwing in the towel, they just want companies like Google to fight for them, and in doing so bear all of the responsibility and cost (while gaining zero benefit).

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on those two, but unfortunately I haven't heard much encouraging come from anyone else. Two people on a 38-member committee is not a strong showing...

Any political action that can restrict the behavior of business is crippled in advance.

Not so. The Republicans have a large majority in the House at present and the SOPA bill was introduced by the chairman of this committee. That's why the hearing is tilted unusually heavily in favor of the proponents. 'Business' includes all the tech companies who are lobbying uphill against SOPA as well.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#235
Is there any silver lining here? Despite the over whelming feeling of disgust I have for these godgie old farts running this country who think they know a damn thing about the Internet, I can't help but wonder if passage of this bill would finally ignite adoption of a better success to the Internet. Something where security and privacy are baked in from the beginning and not an add-on.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You could just as easily ask why the bar has been certifying to many law schools when there are so many unemployed lawyers and less than half of JD graduates are able to get jobs practicing law. I'm kind of supportive of Winston's proposals for deregulating the legal services market, but there is definitely not an artificial scarcity.

Of course, you might be wondering why decent legal services still cost upwards of $300/hour, and my answer to that would be that a lawyer who charges $50 an hour has a hard time getting taken seriously. I've seen people come into internet forums asking the most asinine questions before going on to explain that they didn't trust the answers they received from their public defender, because he works for free and therefore he must not be any good.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#237
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We have the brainpower to take this on." We do? As a non-technical senator, you can make that engineering claim with confidence?

There are so many parallels in this to Atlas Shrugged, it almost makes me think Ayn Rand wasn't a sociopath. Who cares how? Just do it! Let the techies submit their "explanations" in writing and we'll duly ignore them. Godforfuckingbid they actually get a word in edgewise on television. The woman from Google was brilliantly concise, and her explanations made absolutely perfect sense. They were countered with "horse i…

You realize, I hope, the chief proponent of this bill claims to be a proponent of 'limited government': As the federal government gets bigger and bigger, one wonders if the proponents of government health care and cap and trade have read the Constitution? Upholding his oath to defend the Constitution, Congressman Smith believes that government must be limited so that it never becomes powerful enough to infringe on the rights and liberties of individuals.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#238

Zoe Lofgren's statements were really good, and her criticisms of the way the hearing was structured (5 for, 1 against, no engineers) were compelling. Her question of, "How many sites would you want to see taken down?" and the dodging is telling, too. And Darrell Issa did a phenomenal job calling into question the need for the legislation because of the function of the ITC & usefulness of administrative law solutions…

Some instances?

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#239

This is SO OFFENSIVE!!! She gives such great, clear technical answers -- they can detect child porn by a combination of reverse image search analysis and manual checks, but they can't visually tell whether a movie or song is licensed to play. Makes sense. "I'm sure we have the technology, we have the brainpower," responds some congrasshole. What fucking idiots these people are. They don't have a right to dictate term…

Move to Canada? It's easier than moving to the US. :)

Everyone knows that the American dream can be found in the Scandinavian countries.

Re: SOPA Hearing is Streaming Live

#240
post #233

Are these hearings that house.gov streams archived somewhere? If not, why?

I can not find an archive of it.. arg!

Some House hearings are archived at judiciary.edgeboss.net. But not this one.

Some House hearings have transcripts at judiciary.house.gov/hearings/transcripts/. But not this one.

I decided to read the bill instead. I highly recommend it. The definitions alone are worth the read.

What if content is not addressed to a "location"?

What if there is no "site"?

What if a network is not accesible to the public?

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