• Rep. Lamar Smith
• Mark Amodei
• Joe Baca
• John Barrow
• Karen Bass
• Howard Berman
• Marsha Blackburn
• Mary Bono Mack
• Steven Chabot
• Judy Chu
• John Conyers
• Jim Cooper
• Ted Deutch
• Elton Gallegly
• Robert Goodlatte
• Peter King
• John Larson
• Thomas Marino
• Alan Nunnelee
• William Owens
• Adam Schiff
• Brad Sherman
• Debbie Wasserman Schultz
• Melvin Watt

• Pat Leahy
• Lamar Alexander
• Jeff Bingaman
• Richard Blumenthal
• Barbara Boxer
• Sherrod Brown
• Benjamin Cardin
• Robert Casey
• Thad Cochran
• Chris Coons
• Bob Corker
• Richard Durbin
• Michael Enzi
• Dianne Feinstein
• Al Franken
• Kirsten Gillibrand
• Lindsey Graham
• Charles Grassley
• Kay Hagan
• John Isakson
• Tim Johnson
• Amy Klobuchar
• Herbert Kohl
• Mary Landrieu
• Joseph Lieberman
• John McCain
• Robert Menendez
• Bill Nelson
• Charles Schumer
• Jeanne Shaheen
• Tom Udall
• Sheldon Whitehouse

Smith’s statement draws on a high-end estimate also based on flawed assumptions for the U.S. "consumption-based share of counterfeit and pirated goods" in 2008. The cited $100 billion figure doesn’t reflect the costs to the economy, contrary to Smith’s claim; the 2011 study did not assess such costs, which are understandably slippery.

Maybe there is no solid estimate of the cost to the economy. Smith’s CNN.com statement rates False.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, has the sad distinction of being in the vanguard when it comes to really bad ideas concerning the Internet. On his initiative, France became the testing-ground for the three-strikes approach of throwing people off the Internet upon multiple accusations of copyright infringement, without the need for proof or a court order, known there as HADOPI. He also helped put into circulation a view that is much in vogue at the moment:

"Internet is a new frontier, a territory to conquer. But it cannot be a Wild West, a lawless place"

Of course, this overlooks the fact that the Internet is already subject to a whole host of laws in every country. Indeed, often it is subject to multiple jurisdictions because of its global reach and complicated legal position. But there's an even deeper sense in which the idea that the Internet is a Wild West that needs far-reaching laws like SOPA and PIPA imposed upon it is exactly wrong.

To see why, consider one of the key ideas of SOPA in the original version:

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the companion bill to the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act, would further privatize adjudication and punishment. Title I of that law (dubbed the E-PARASITE Act) creates a “market-based system to protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. funding of sites dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” It achieves this by empowering copyright owners who have a “good faith belief” that they are being “harmed by the activities” of a website to send a notice to the site’s payment providers (e.g. PayPal) and Internet advertisers to end business with the allegedly offending site.

The payment providers and advertisers that receive the notice must stop transactions with the site. No judicial review is required for the notice to be sent and for the payments and advertising curtailed -- only the good faith representation of the copyright owner. Damages are also not available to the site owner unless a claimant “knowingly materially” misrepresented that the law covers the targeted site, a difficult legal test to meet. The owner of the site can issue a counter-notice to restore payment processing and advertising but services need not comply with the counter-notice.

What both of these approaches and France's HADOPI have in common is that they all seek to institute a system that is extra-judicial, with no requirement for proof of any kind, and which is hard or impossible to appeal against. It is the very definition of arbitrary vigilantism, where private actors get to be judge, jury and executioner. In other words, far from taming a "lawless place" online, SOPA and its ilk would create one where there is none currently.

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The top album in 1999, “Millennium” by the Backstreet Boys, sold 9.4 million copies. The top 2011 album, Adele’s “21,” sold 5.8 million.

Hollywood was hit by piracy somewhat later because movie files are bigger and require more Internet bandwidth. But home entertainment sales -- a huge chunk of movie revenues -- fell every year from 2004 to 2010.

While box-office revenues have benefited from rising ticket prices, movie attendance has been steadily declining.

Of course, not every pirated download displaces the sale of a book, album or movie. But when it comes to music, most economic studies have concluded that piracy accounts for the vast majority or even entirety of the sales decline.

Many Internet enthusiasts say that this change isn’t unhealthy, and that the Web makes more ventures possible. They point out that while piracy may be cutting the pay of record label executives, it doesn’t seem to have stopped musicians from making new music. According to Nielsen, 75,300 albums were released in 2010, 25 percent more than in 2005. But new releases that sold more than 1,000 copies fell to about 4,700 from 8,000 during that time. The wave of creation that is more hobby than profession has little to do with piracy, and would likely be unaffected by laws to curb illicit downloads.

But if professional musicians, movie directors and writers can’t make money from their art, they will probably make less of it.

In 1998, Corning divested its consumer products division which subsequently adopted the name World Kitchen, acquiring the rights to the pyrex® trademark. The company introduced clear tempered soda-lime glass kitchenware and bakeware under the pyrex® name. link

When trademarked as PYREX® (all UPPER CASE LETTERS plus, in the USA, a trademark notice comprising a capital “R” in a circle) the trademark includes clear, low-thermal-expansion borosilicate glass used for laboratory glassware and kitchenware, plus other kitchenware including opaque tempered high-thermal-expansion soda-lime glass, pyroceram, stoneware, and metal items See. e.g., http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?index=kitchen-uk&field-keywords=pyrex. European trademark usage differs from American and the encircled "R" is not present on European PYREX items.

When trademarked as pyrex® (all lower case letters plus a trademark notice comprising a capital “R” in a circle) the trademark includes clear tempered high-thermal-expansion soda-lime glass kitchenware, plus other non-glass kitchenware, made by World Kitchen. See, e.g., http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_kitchen?node=1055398&field-brandtextbin=Pyrex

the dictates of good eyes and common sense lead inexorably to the conclusion that there is no substantial similarity between Plaintiff’s works and the allegedly infringing compositions

"The District Court improperly dismissed my law suit because it did not apply the copyright law correctly," it reads, adding that the previous decision "exhibited a lack of intrinsic comprehension of art, and its expression or intended expression." Gordon claims that the court ignored the copyrightable elements of her work and that its judgement rested on the content rather than the stylistic decisions of her photographs: "the District Court’s focus on the similarity in subject matter, which was only part of my artistic choice, was a great error."

The startup Curebit brought something of a firestorm down on its head recently. Here's how VentureBeat broke the story:

Curebit, a Y Combinator startup that just closed a round of funding from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund, has been caught red-handed stealing HTML code, images, and the like from 37signals.

Paul Carr, for example, not only believes that it was copyright infringement pure and simple, he suggests there's some deep hypocrisy flying around the developer community here:

The prevailing view, outside of Hollywood, seems to be that IP creators need to accept that copying is here to stay and that criminalising a “victimless” activity is stupid. Make it easy for us to pay for stuff and we won’t have to steal it.

And yet when the victim isn’t a big evil Hollywood mogul (or one of the tens of thousands of people who work for him) but one of our own… well, then IP thieves should be dragged through the streets until they tearfully apologise. What’s the difference?

Reputation is the glue that holds together all of the hugely-successful open collaborative software projects like Linux or Apache: there's no money involved (at least, not directly), but people are paid in terms of the respect they earn from their peers for what they do and how well they do it. Failing to acknowledge the fact that you are using their work is tantamount to disrespecting that code -- and hence the norms of the community.

That, I think, is why parts of the developer world world reacted so violently to Curebit's use of 37signal's code and images. If Curebit had admitted what it was doing up front, with full acknowledgement of the provenance of the work, and noted that it was building on 37signal's code as an act of respect, I suggest that few would have cared. The community norms would have been maintained, 37signal's reputation would have been enhanced, and its coders would have received the kudos that was rightfully theirs.

So this is not, as Carr suggests, a case of double standards on copyright infringement. The "infringement" here -- which undoubtedly exists according to the letter of the law – is irrelevant for a community that has placed sharing and collaboration at its heart. This is not about who owns what, but about who respects whom -- and shows it in the appropriate way.

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