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Originally posted by Geezer:
Without Wikipedia available, I cannot do the research needed to respond to this thread.

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Originally posted by SignyM:
So is Enenews, one of my "go to" websites for all things Fukushima.

So, do YOU know what SOPA. PIPA is about? And, if so, did YOU contact your Congresspeeps?

And if not... now you know why democracy is failing.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:

If Ambercrombie and Fitch makes a shirt that costs $100, and someone else makes a similar shirt and sells it for $15 dollars, they probably have a better and more efficient production process and deserve to be successful.

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Thank you for contacting me about H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and S. 968, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).

Protecting intellectual property on the Internet is a complicated issue with several different proposals pending before Congress. The bills which have received the most attention -- SOPA and PIPA -- are pending before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, on which I do not serve.

I understand your concerns about the importance of protecting intellectual property without harming free speech, innovation, or creativity. This is a delicate balance to strike and I am committed to ensuring no Americans' rights or freedoms are infringed upon. I believe that a consensus on the issue between the content and technology industries is achievable. Until this is achieved, I cannot support the current forms of SOPA or PIPA

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the bill with witnesses from all sides of the debate in November and began marking up the bill last December. After two days of discussion and amendments, the House Judiciary Committee indefinitely delayed action on SOPA.

Recently, the House Speaker announced that this legislation will not be considered in the full House of Representatives until consensus is reached, and the many outstanding issues are resolved. It is unclear what, if any, action is expected in the Senate. In order for a bill to be signed into law, the identical legislation must pass through both bodies of Congress and much work remains.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your concerns with me; I truly value your perspective on this important issue. As always, please feel free to visit my web site at -

http://www.house.gov/johnlewis for more information on legislation that interests you.



Sincerely,

John Lewis
Member of Congress

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Not that I support SOPA, but that's not really an apt comparison. Media pirates aren't producing their own product that is remarkably simmilar to someone else's - they are distributing the actual films/music/books/etc.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:

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Not that I support SOPA, but that's not really an apt comparison. Media pirates aren't producing their own product that is remarkably simmilar to someone else's - they are distributing the actual films/music/books/etc.

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Again, the bill in question doesn't just address piracy, but also web stores for counterfeit products. I am of course talking about the later one.

"rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods" -PIPA

"The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a law (bill) of the United States proposed in 2011 to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods." -SOPA

Definition of counterfeit goods in a similar bill which this is based off of:

"(ii) to sell or distribute goods, services, or materials bearing a counterfeit mark, as that term is defined in section 34(d) of the Act entitled 'An Act to provide for the registration and protection of trademarks used in commerce, to carry out the provisions of certain international conventions, and for other purposes', approved July 5, 1946 (commonly referred to as the 'Trademark Act of 1946' or the 'Lanham Act'; 15 U.S.C. § 1116(d))"

So, yeah, actually the two scenarios I mentioned are exactly an example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOPA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combating_Online_Infringement_and_Counter
feits_Act

A problem also exists where an Indy movie studio and big movie studio could be producing similar movies, and the big movie studio could shut the other down because of it.

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She had what she describes as a “culturally privileged upbringing” in Moscow.

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At university, Coffman majored in computational linguistics, a field that combined her interests in language and science. She was a top student and won a scholarship for business school in the Bay Area. She arrived during the dotcom boom and never left. “When I moved to the US, I didn’t have this idea of the shining beacon of democracy,” she says. But at least she could feel safe. “I would walk down the street and the police officer wouldn’t assault me or ask me for a bribe.”

Coffman, who has broad shoulders under a bob of blond hair, thinks and talks deliberately. She lives in a compact townhouse in a planned community in San Jose, California. The museums and galleries are harder to get to now (“I have to drive to San Francisco, find parking”), but she keeps stimulated with books, hobbies, and books about her hobbies. When I visited her at home earlier this year, she walked me past the weight-lifting setup on the ground floor. (She read Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training for that one. She approves of the book because it’s “like a science manual.”) Upstairs, I recognized the tall, narrow bookshelf that appears behind her during Zoom calls. It contains dozens of titles that wouldn’t look out of place in a history grad student’s apartment—Hitler’s Generals on Trial. Kiev: 1941. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying. A few others, like In the Company of Women, nod to a career in business.

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