This bill is a nuclear bomb detonated in downtown Silicon Valley.

I too, would like to preserve it, for posterity.

Actually, when I first read it, I thought it was a deliberate typo. I liked it better that way. Ah well.

Stealing trade secrets is already a 10 year sentence.

Not that I agree with it. Just saying. I think it's a bit disgusting that stealing the recipe for Coca-Cola carries a greater penalty than rape or manslaughter. In Federal prison, no less.

I've already written letters and made phone calls to all of my congress critters regarding both of these bills. It's bad enough that they want to write an internet censorship bill to stop online piracy. Yes, that's bad. A $2500 fine for having a copyrighted song playing the background of a youtube video of your kid's birthday party is stupid. I think most everyone on this forum would agree that that is bad. Great.

But, and this is a huge but, even if you don't agree that it's bad and you think it's ok for the gov't to black list web sites without a warrant with no legal recourse, the worst part is that IT WON'T f*ckING WORK! This is the internet we're talking about, a system that is designed to be so adaptable to things breaking as to survive a nuclear holocaust. All it will do is fracture the internet into multiple internets with tons of new and interesting DNS servers out there. Making for more pain for end users and more opportunities for criminals to access traffic. It's nuts to think you can just flip a switch and computers connected to the internet will somehow magically never be able to connect to the internet again and restart publishing data. It's complete and total magical thinking bull crap.

YOU CAN'T STOP THE SIGNAL! You can only force people to move to a new house and start broadcasting again.

Sadly you could get that for merely singing "Happy Birthday" since it's a copyrighted song.

Even if we grant the fallacious assumption that 1 pirated copy = 1 lost sale this number still seems pretty inflated. The statement is a great way to play on people's fears in the current economic/job situation and sneak this through.

But it's a legit reason. We are losing jobs here because of over reaching laws.

This.

Because this.

Please note that the Feds cleaned out the co-lo in this raid, confiscating all housed hardware, because of a complaint from AT&T and Version about unpaid bills by some customers of the facility. This wasn't even a 'cloud' per se. Just a co-location facility where small operations who couldn't afford their own datacenter rented space.

If I possess your hardware, your data is mine.

Eventually, supporters of advanced distribution procedures will have to broadcast their pirate signals in mobile server platforms from underground, with their hackers and sysads standing by to protect their datastreams. One can only hope that they have the foresight not to line the entire exterior of their craft with giant neon highlights.

What adds insult to injury is that Micheal Jackson isn't even alive anymore to benefit from sales of his work, so you can't say that getting copies of his song is hurting him - the guy's dead, for god's sake. This comparison underlines who controls the law and where their interests lie.

*edit: removed Tanhausered bits*

(Cross-thread thought, I'll add it here for now but I'm not meaning to derail.)
Also piracy supposedly cost $100 billion a year and the response is to censor and monitor the entire internet. Investment bankers and related parties cost the nation however many trillion dollars in a rather short time span, hundreds of thousands of jobs, etc.. and the response is to bail them out. I'm not suggesting they should bail out record companies, just noting what strikes me as an odd hypocrisy.

DSGamer:

Precisely. Current copyright laws extend far beyond just compensation for artists and delve into concepts of copyrights as inherited birthrights - which in many cases runs counter to the stated purpose of copyright to begin with. It has more to do with copyright owners wanting to make more money and less to do with just compensation.

By the same argument, patients I treat should continue to pay my children until well past my death. I don't charge such silly fees.

krev82:

It's not that odd if you just follow the money. Your society has substituted banks and copyright owners for landowners, but the basic essence is similar - they own you and you are their serfs. They get to write laws that benefit them, and you - well you get the bread and circuses.

Off topic, but I instantly recognized the picture in that article as coming from one of my company's data center's. Though, we were definitely not the subject of the article itself.