I have to say I still like the idea of this law. Fix the details that keep sky is falling issues, but stop pirates and filelockers. :thumbsup

Exactly how would that bill hurt this "industry"? That's a serious question. This "industry" has been almost gutted to the ground by piracy already. There ain't a whole lot left (in comparison to what it was 4 years ago).

So what exactly would the bill do to "hurt" us?

What could it do to hurt claudiamarie.com? I don't really give a fuck about my free sites and affiliate work anymore because piracy and tube sites full of full scenes have already destroyed that.

I just want somebody to tell me how it's going to hurt MY business in any way. All I see it doing is making it more profitable. And no...I don't want to hear about people losing their "freedom" to steal shit. I want to know in black and white terms EXACTLY how this bill is going to hurt MY business and cost me money...you know the way piracy already has.

Word!

You and I know full well it wouldn't hurt your business Robbie, but would definitely help. Same with mine. But it would only help the people that actually produce content. If I was making bank on stealing shit, it would be a drag to lose an income stream over some dumb law that actually punishes you for stealing. If not this one, then I hope they hurry with another. :thumbsup

The ignorance in this thread is astonishing.

Everyone here likes the IDEA of a law that would stop piracy. Everyone*. The problem is that SOPA is not that law.




*apart from GG, but he is a loony.

The law does not require the accuser to contact anyone. The law gives the accuser the ability to contact anyone that does business with the accused (could be a hosting company, the registrar, an advertiser, a biller,...)

I understand. I have mentioned all kinds of different problems. But that's because this SOPA bill is overly broad.

One of the problems with SOPA is that even if the white house does not use SOPA to go after people, anyone else still can. SOPA gives an IP rights holder (or someone who pretends to be an IP rights holder) the ability to take down sites without any intervention of the courts. Under SOPA (as described by those pushing SOPA), it's the accused who will have to take things to court.

Well, SOPA isn't about ISPs, it's about people like you and me, about anyone who does business online, about anyone who runs a website, about anyone who makes a product that can be used to communicate over the internet...

Let me give you an example from a recent Techdirt article:

More Collateral Damage From SOPA: People With Print Disabilities And Human Rights Groups

from the add-them-to-the-list dept

As people wake up to the full horror of what SOPA would do to the Internet and its users, an increasing number of organizations with very different backgrounds are coming out against it. Here's one more to add to that list, from the world of non-profit humanitarian groups.

As Jim Fruchterman, president of the Silicon Valley-based Benetech, explains in his post "Why I am Scared of the SOPA bill":

We write software for people with disabilities as well as human rights and environmental groups. We?re against piracy, and have made commitments to authors and publishers to encourage compliance with copyright law.

So, we shouldn?t have anything to fear from a bill entitled ?Stop Online Piracy Act,? right? Unfortunately, that?s not the case.

We?re getting very worried that our organization and the people we serve: people with print disabilities (i.e., people who are blind or severely dyslexic), and human rights groups will be collateral damage in Hollywood?s attempt to break the Internet in their latest effort to squash ?piracy.? And, if we?re worried, a lot of other good organizations should start getting worried!

Fruchterman goes on to explore two major areas of concern. The first is that Bookshare, an online library for people who can?t read standard print books, might lose the ability to raise funds or take subscriptions.

As he points out, Bookshare is legal in the US, but that doesn't stop authors, agents or publishers who don?t know much about people with disabilities or copyright law sending cease and desist letters. At present, Benetech has time to talk people through the law before anything drastic happens. Here's how SOPA would change all that:

SOPA apparently has shoot first, ask questions later provisions. If any single publisher or author of any one of the more than 130,000 accessible books in our library gets antsy, they can send a notice to VISA and MasterCard and say, stop money from going to Benetech and Bookshare. No more donations to our charity. No more subscriptions from individual adults with disabilities.

No need to send us a letter. Or file a DMCA notice. Or do any real research. Just send out a bunch of notices and get all those pirates! Except, we?re not pirates. But, now the burden of proof has shifted to us: we?re presumed guilty, and we have to spent time and money defending ourselves.

There are two major problems here. First, the money gets cuts off immediately, jeopardizing the entire Bookshare project. Secondly, Benetech has to spend its limited funds paying lawyers to get the financial blocks removed. That will not only take time, it will hamper other worthwhile projects that Benetech could have been working on instead of fighting to get its revenue sources turned back on again.

It's those other projects that Fruchterman worries about in his second concern. Benetech develops free software to help human rights activists around the world safely record stories of human rights abuse. As Fruchterman points out, if SOPA becomes law, his organization will find itself in an impossible position:

...

In addition to that: SOPA does not require the accuser to contact the accused. The accuser can contact your hosting company, your biller, your registrar,... without contacting you. The entity that was contacted by the accuser then has 5 days to take action and contact the accused.

Robbie,

You replied to my first comment in this thread. I hope you also read my other comments here as they answer your questions.

Do I know what's going to happen to your business? Of course not, I'm not psychic. Can I think of a couple of ways SOPA can be used to harm your business? Ok, here goes:

Let's say you pissed off X.

- X contacts your biller and accuses you of hosting/selling content he owns the rights to.
- Your biller now has 5 days to contact you and tell you to stop violating the accuser's rights.
- If within those 5 days the content is not removed, your biller has to make a decision: either stop doing business with you or automatically become liable/responsible for the alleged IP rights violation in question.
That means if your biller chooses to continue doing business with you, it risks being taken to court over the (alleged) IP rights violation.

You'll probably say: But I own all the rights to my content. Hell, I even married the model. All of that is irrelevant under SOPA. Under the immunity clause anyone (biller, hos, registrar,...) that cuts you off in order to comply with a SOPA notice will not be responsible for any damage to your business (loss of income etc).

So if your biller gets a SOPA notice, it cannot be sued by you if it cuts you off, but it can be sued by the accuser (for the IP rights violation, you are being accused of) if it doesn't cut you of. How many hosting companies, billers, registrars, ad networks etc are equipped to do a full investigation and willing to make a decision to take a stand (and risk being taken to court over the alleged actions of a 3rd party) in under 5 days?

Under SOPA, it's you, the accused, that would have to take X to court to prove he's wrong.

In all fairness, If you take X to court and X looses, X could of course be held accountable and be sued for damages. Only problem: your business would already be dead in the water by then.

I was referring to the "if... kill the fucker" part as well as the "carpet bombing" and similar remarks in this thread.

Well, because some people cried wolf once and nothing happened, doesn't mean that there aren't any bad things out there.

My whole point (as well as that of the EFF, Google, Microsoft, Zynga, Twitter, Wikipedia,..., civil liberties groups, law professors etc) is that while it is called the "Stop online Piracy Act", it will harm a lot more people than just the pirates. It is overly broad and can easily be abused.

A small list of people and organizations who are worried:

source: EFF:

Open educational resources

Some sites with reason to be particularly concerned are international communities dedicated to ?open educational resources? (OERs), which are created to be shared, built upon, and used in education. Sites like the Japan Opencourseware Consortium or Universia, which offer resources from more than 1,000 universities and represents over 10 million students, could fall into this category. In the past decade, these resources have become increasingly popular across the world, aided by the dropping cost of digital distribution and the availability of technologies and platforms for hosting and sharing. SOPA could reverse those changes by placing prohibitive liability burdens on sites that offer these resources and the platforms that enable them.

http://www.librarycopyrightalliance....opa-8nov11.pdf

...The Library Copyright Alliance, a group whose members include the American Library Association and two other major library organizations, has also written a letter to the House of Representatives raising major issues with the bill.
...SOPA, could lead to criminal prosecutions of libraries, even for activities that are a fair use and conducted without the intention of commercial gain....

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/indus...05633152.story

SOPA and PIPA are not the way to help musicians

Ryan Chisholm, a manager at Bill Silva Entertainment:

SOPA/Protect IP could make it harder for tomorrow's innovative services to be developed. Today, we are only beginning to realize the potential of sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud - along with numerous popular blogs and thousands of music sites - in driving discovery of and monetization around music. These platforms have become some of the greatest tools we in the business have ever had at our disposal. These sites provide fans the opportunity to participate more directly and meaningfully in the content provided by artists and rightwsholders. In their current form, SOPA/Protect IP give far too much leeway for legitimate expression to be silenced on the grounds of combating infringement. This affects far more than the entertainment industries.

http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=4774

The Writers Guild of America West recently made the rounds on Capitol Hill to talk about a number of issues. On the list? How SOPA will do more harm than good:

On the House side, Keyser and Barrios met with Reps. Henry Waxman, Howard Berman, and Janice Hahn. They thanked Waxman for his strong support of Guild issues and discussed concerns with the recently introduced Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Because Berman is a co-sponsor of SOPA, the pair discussed their concerns with the bill?s implications for competition and an open Internet. Although the WGAW strongly supports combating piracy, the competition, First Amendment, and due process concerns the bill creates must be addressed.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ny-times.shtml
...

</thread summary>

The current laws if used correctly do a perfect job of stopping piracy

you don't need anything else.

in fact they are too strong, and need to be balanced by adding equal penalties when you abuse fair use.

you do realize your talking to robbie right

logic and rational thought doesn't work with him.

They don't

You do

They're not

They don't

Apart from that, spot on :)

I don't. I think governments should be spending time and money on things of far more importance.

Lets face it, no one here really gives a shit about piracy, we all just want more money.

There are far more worse things in life to worry about.

I preceeded Kill the fucker, if the internet requires THEFT for survival. I feel terrible for those guys that are afraid it will hurt them. Just as they stay awake nights knowing how easy it is for people to steal the content I create. I am not convinced that I will be able to say that there is one of my images in google images, and google will be shut down in 5 days. I always hear a lot of sky is falling when new laws are proposed, and I just think this time it is fear and panic created for a different agenda that isn't proper to admit.

I'm going on a trip soon and want to load my tablet with movies, tv shows etc. anyone know a legit place to buy and download them from? not really wanting to go through ripping and encoding dvd's... I'm wanting a place online. I know their are "apps" for that....

I could easily grab a torrent, I have in the past... but I won't ever again!

At the end of the day whether I like the law or hate it makes very little difference. Think .XXX . Lot of us didn't like that too.

Amazon.com has movies you can buy via download. some of them can be kind of expensive like the new Planet of the Apes movie is $15.00. For that you can stream it to your computer and/or download it to your device and own it.

Some of the older movies are less and run between $7-$10.

I have never used their service to buy a movie like this. I just got the new Kindle and it comes with a free month of Prime service so I have watched a few movies and noticed the pay to own option.

I would like to clarify something.

If X contacts your host with a SOPA notice accusing you of harboring illegal content, the host has 5 days to contact you to tell you to remove the content, and even if you send PROOF to the host of your rights to have the content on your site, they will still shut you down?
Would not the host contact the accuser and say "the person has written proof he has the rights to display that content, here it is." and be done with it?

At this point the accuser can deny reality and sue the host, but where will that get them?

Furthermore, is there no penalty for issuing a FALSE accusation?

.

iTunes or Amazon.

Thanks guys, I knew Amazon sold mp3 albums, didn't know they did movies too.

The problem is that under SOPA, that host could indeed be sued. Under SOPA, that hosting company would be taking a serious risk if it kept that content online after the period of 5 days has passed. The automatic reaction for a lot of hosting companies, billers, registrars etc would be to automatically or in most cases cut off the customer as it would in most cases be the most cost effective / least risky thing to do.

Even if your host, biller, registrar,... doesn't cut you off, handling SOPA notices would create an extra cost that would undoubtedly be passed on to you, the customer.

Not directly under SOPA no, but the falsely accused could later always sue for damages. The problem here is that you can only do that when the harm has already been done.

I know and that's why I threw in the generalization remark because we both know the internet does no require theft :)

Personally, I think that those who feel they are hit the most by piracy fail to see the real dangers of such an overly broad law. The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.

I've got a feeling i won't be able to change your mind on this SOPA thing, so we'll agree to disagree :)

On the matter of the sky's tendency to fall when new laws are proposed; it's possible the most dangerous aspects of certain laws never materialized because people saw them coming and made a lot of noise and managed to gets those bills amended.

Yes I understand that, but if the accused has the necessary documents to prove he has the rights to have the content online, and presents them to said host who then presents them to the accuser, the accuser is going to come back with "those docs are false" or "we were mistaken, he does have the rights."

So if the accuser says "those docs are false" and they are lying, if the host shuts down the accused's websites they will be able to sue the accuser for everything they have and then some. It might take some time, but it would be an easy win in the courts.

Which many would be glad to pay in order to have the hosts on their side, if they are abiding by the law and not engaged in piracy of course.

And one big question would be "Why would the accuser come after a company who is legally using their content?"

.

What would you rather focus on: making money or defending yourself against false claims and suing people for the damage they caused to your business?

It still puts an unnecessary burden on hosts, registrars, billers, anyone doing business online.

Besides, this was only one example. The whole reputation rights issue opens a whole new can of worms.

I think that would quickly become a moot point after a few false accusations ended up with the accusers getting taken for everything they have in the courts.
With something like this, precedents are set very quickly.
True, it does put an additional burden on them, but perhaps it should?
It might also make those hosts, registrars and billers think twice about who they are doing business with and scrutinize their potential clients a little more.

It has been a free for all, wild wild west show on the net for years afterall...

I don't know. At first I liked the general SOPA idea, then I thought "more big brother legislation?" so I am really on the fence with it.
"Trust in Government" these days is precarious, yet piracy remains one of the biggest problems before us.

.

U-bob, i appreciate your comments & concern. The part i highlighted though...you are saying that a biller, or a processor, or an ISP, will decide to terminate their business with a paying client over a third party complaint, that may not be valid, because they fear getting sued under SOPA. I personally don't think this will happen. If their customer has the facts behind them, & has done nothing wrong, i see no cause that a biller is going to terminate business over the fear of a suit from a third party. Its expensive for complaintants to litigate so i dont think petty complaints are going to make websites disappear. it is also bad business for any company to dispose of its customers so cavalierly.

its hard to pass judgement on this shit. This bill reminds me of the patriot act. All this handwringing by liberrtarians about the loss of liberties & government spying on the public. However i see no people in jail, or my personal life, effected in any way by the law.

DAMIAN J - can you provide something inciteful, other then everyone is an idiot. thanks.

The American Dream. As long as YOU are alright, fuck everyone else.

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/26/hap...triot-act.html

DAMIAN J - can you provide something inciteful, other then everyone is an idiot. thanks.[/QUOTE]

I've not said "everyone" is an idiot. There are many people in this thread that understand why the bill is fucked.

And no, debating this with you would be like atheist trying to debate with a born again Christian. Just pointless. I defend to the death your right to think giving power to anyone to close down websites with no due process is a good idea. I disagree with you.

It's all moot anyway, as it isn't going to pass.

UBob...don't hosts already have to do the exact same thing as far as DMCA notices go? If a pirate site refused to do a takedown...you then dmca the host. And all the things you listed then take place anyway.

Seems to me that if a law like SOPA that actually has some teeth in it were to go in effect..then MAYBE a host would be a little less likely to ever host a site like Pornhub in the beginning.

There's a reason that Swiftwill has been moving Pornhubs servers to their NOC in the Netherlands. They know what is coming.

Bottom line is....this law won't hurt me one tiny bit. It will make my sales go up. Which is what I am in business for.
Will it take down Google? No way. Will it make Google police itself. Yes. And about damn time.

RYC just sent me a new long list of links to my pirated material that they had removed from Google search.

Google is a big company with the most advanced technology. They are perfectly capable of taking down pirate links AND removing their "images" tab.

It wouldn't affect the legitimate "search" function of google in any way

It's not easy to predict how individual companies will choose to manage those risks, but let's say in the case of a registrar:
$8 a year income (1 domain) vs the risk of getting sued.
Now let's take paypal: They also have a history of suspend first, ask questions later.
Even if a host does not cut you off, SOPA notices can still be used as an efficient Denial of Service tactic. 1 semi-cut-and-paste email from an accuser will require a lot of effort from the accused to counter.

This effects EVERYTHING down to web hosting and how much everyone will be paying for that.

If your host hosts a few larger tubes, and they are forced to cut them off with 5 days notice, your host is stuck with bandwidth commitments for possibly 10s of gbits of transfer with their upstream providers for years. Hosts often sign 2-3 year contracts on the bandwidth they later resell.

Imagine you are a webhost, and you have to shut down your 10 biggest clients because of legitimate or illegitamate SOPA requests. You are still stuck paying tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on bandwidth commitments you can't use fill with your remaining clients. They'll need to jack up prices or go under...many of their remaining clients will also split for european webhosting companies out of fear alone.

im sorry but bottom line is we are debating hypotheticals. i think most of this will play out among the big entertainment firms (the people pushing the law), the big ISPs, & the big piracy players. i don't presume the law will end piracy. if it makes stolen content harder for surfers to find, i'm good with that.

maybe all program owners should not hire anyone that is against this bill.

if the interweb dies I'll make dvd's and magazines, that would be better than letting things go on like this....

why does everyone keep blaming the greedy producers? it's the content thieves that are to blame for the need of such a strong lay!

True.

And in my personal experience...folks theorizing on what might happen has never been a way to do business. Especially when I can juxtapose it against what has been happening in reality for the last few years with piracy pretty much decimating our industry (and most others as well).

Harsh reality vs. theory.
For me, and most guys who are in the porn biz...it's a no-brainer. Reality has been that this business has been hurt BAD by piracy. The theory that maybe my hosting bill might go back up to what it was 10 years ago doesn't bother me one little bit. I'll be able to afford it just fine once everything isn't stolen and given away for free again. Or the theory that Google might have to police itself...again, that doesn't affect my bottom line in any way. I was making millions before Google even existed.

Whether it's this law or a similar one, something must be done. It's way overdue. And for those of us who have been shouldering the burden of piracy in our own business, I'd say it's about time that the burden shifted to people who do the pirating and who support stealing by doing business with pirates.

I guess we'll see what happens.
Look at it this way: gideongallery is scared to death of it. That should tell you all you need to know.

I thought your stuff was locked down and unpirateable?

:)

All True, and giving a government that much control is so short sighted that it's INSANE to me.

People just keep on getting led further and further down the garden path of wider and tighter government controls in order to be "protected"

Damn fools.


.:2 cents:


.:Oh crap

your right, we should get rid of all law enforcement too, let people stand up for themselves like on the internet!

remove all laws in the usa

Michael is right...the govt. does a LOT of overreaching and intruding in people's personal lives.
But it also has the responsibility to create some real laws as well. And since the GOVT. is the one who created the horribly outdated DMCA law in the first place, then they should be the ones to step back in and fix it.

Stealing is stealing and should be against the law. It's just common sense. Govt. should have a limited role. And if they are forced to enact laws against piracy, then people shouldn't be blaming those of us who do not steal. They should be blaming the thieves who are bringing this down on all of our heads.

But nobody will. Instead they will all kiss up to companies like Manwin and their ilk and continue to figure out ways to race to the bottom as fast as they can and ridicule those of us who honestly work and create things.

One of the differences between DMCA and SOPA is that the host isn't liable as long as they comply with DMCA takedown notices. Of course we all know what cat and mouse game some of the tube sites have been playing, but in all honesty: I don't understand why a lot of content producers that complain about the tubes hiding behind the DMCA never sued those tubes. Under the current system, the fraudulent use of the DMCA safe harbor provisions could be used to take a tube to court.

DMCA did create a clear mechanism. You identify specific infringing content, file a complaint with the site in question, and that site has the right to respond and to claim fair use. Under SOPA, that site's billing, hosting,... could be shut down until things are resolved in court.

SOPA goes even further. Its language is so broad that any general purpose platform can be described as 'dedicated to theft'. Fore example, under SOPA ICQ (it can be used to transfer files) could be banned from the US unless the people running it can somehow guarantee that it can't be used to exchange pirated files (either by removing functionality or by adding a monitoring system and shutting down users that exchange pirated files).

I agree with joshgirls as far as that the examples I gave are hypotheticals. The dangers however are not. Personally, I think that statements like "it won't affect me" have no basis. There's no way of seeing in the future and knowing how specific laws and regulations will or won't be used against specific individuals. I don't know who will be affected an who won't.

What we can do is analyze how the proposed process works and what its effects will be on those who do come into contact with it.

problem with dmca, send notice, they take down then re add later. any website with user upload should be responsible for content online. i would be happy if they would just shut down sites after recieving x number of dmca's but thats not how it works. it's not fair for us to have to police out stolen content.

I still don't see one thing it can do to affect me in any way, shape or form negatively. All the effects I see from a business point of view are good for me.

If I'm wrong, then I'll suffer. But it can't be anywhere near the amount of suffering that this business has taken from piracy. Not even close.

While we can really bitch and moan until we all turn blue and there's nothign we can say or do that will change the outcome of this, here's some totally hypothetical situations that might effect you:

Someone signs up for a membership on your site, and see's a piece of filler content for which you purchased license from someone. They are the real rights holder, and the guy that sold you the content turned out to be a scammer. They contact your host, biller, bank etc and you get shut down unless you take down that piece of content. Even worse, a content producer decides he wants all of his content to now be exclusive, and does BS requests like this.

A radio is playing in the background of one of the shoots on site. RIAA decides they don't like this and send a SOPA request. You can take down the video or edit it, but it's a pain in the ass to edit, money lost on the shoot if you remove it. You can fight saying fair use, but again the burden of proof is on you.

A competitor claims that all your content is actually his. You get shut down and have to go to court to prove otherwise.

Your host has to shut down thier biggest customers and tons of others to european hosts where this law does not apply. They go under due to not being able to meet thier contractual obligations to their upstream providers, server leasing companies, etc, along with many, many other US based webhosts, and you need to move your site to europe where the performance will be slower due to geographical distance from your target US audience, reducing sales. These foreign webhosting companies won't nessesarily have the capital to invest into buying servers and infrastructure fast enough for the sudden growth, and your site may be down for some time thus losing sales, causing chargebacks, etc.

The designer that made your site used some font, clipart or stock images that didn't have the correct license for commercial use. License holder forces you to redesign or invest some time or money into changing your website. The designer didn't even have do it on purpose - someone else might have uploaded this imagery to sxc.hu for instance and wrote that it's a totally open license.

Even if you say "none of these apply to me", there is infinately more scenarios that can (or at least can as per my understanding of this situation)

You bring up some good points konrad. And you're right NONE of those scenarios do apply to me in any way at all.

It definitely could affect people who don't produce their own content and music,etc. But not me.
And the things you point out are already against the law anyway. Every point you just made is illegal and the same actions could be taken right now without SOPA

I'm more interested in stopping pirates from downloading every members area and re-posting it on file share, illegit tubes, and bit torrent sites and killing the business.

As for hosting...IF the U.S. blocks all those pirate sites that run to European hosting companies...it won't bother me one little bit. Guess what? People in the U.S. would then return to websites that are not stealing and the hosting companies right here would still have that U.S. traffic.

I think that you might only be looking at SOME of the possibilities without thinking about the positive ones as well.

I've tried to think of how this law could possibly negatively affect me or any other honest guys who shoot their own stuff and/or legit buy their content fully licensed and run a tight ship.
I can not think of even ONE thing. And even if some theoretical thing could "hurt" me...it would pale in comparison to what thieves have already done with piracy to this business.

I watched a million dollar a year income from being an affiliate drop to a few thousand a month because every program had their entire members areas available for free on pirate sites. Nobody wants to buy something that is already free.

EDIT: Also...on your comment on site design. Zuzanna did mine. And she used the pictures I gave her for the graphics, pictures I personally took and own. So that one doesn't apply either. I run a tight, tight ship here..As everyone should. :)

There's certainly two sides to it of course, and we'll just have to see how it plays out. It's just that this carries alot of risk for misuse, and the big guys will just move their torrent and tube sites to european hosts, billers, registrars and banks. They aren't gonna just walk away from the huge incomes that those types of sites generate.

I'm thinking that those huge incomes aren't gonna be there if the majority of the U.S. market is cut off. And we also don't know what treaties with European nations are going to come into effect afterwards either.

Piracy is hurting Europe badly too. And in this economic climate I think it's very possible that many of the countries who have harbored piracy might be changing their laws in the wake of this. Especially if new treaties take place that could bring about economic sanctions.

There are a lot more possibilities to this than just negative in my opinion. And as I said...once sites like Pornhub no longer have that kind of traffic...well, all those people aren't just gonna say: "I give up and will never look at porn online again". Nope, they will start surfing legitimate sites again. Just like they always did.

And biller, hosting companies, etc. will still make their money.

even if every every "illegal" tube shut down today sites with legal full length vids like porn.com would still take all the traffic. sopa will never change that. the reality is that they paysite model is a dinosaur and all the legislation in the world will never time travel you back to 1999.

At least that would be fair competition in an open, but protected market. Miss Solo X would have a choice.

The way it is now, she does not have the ressources to police her own work. Instead of producing quality and marketing, she has to spend time and money on protecting her work from the copythieves.

Seems like SOPA brings more benefits than negatives to the majority in the industry. There are quite a few that will be hurt by this, but overall the way the internet is, and the economy is, gov'ts are crazy to not try and stop piracy. How many people have been laid off or left adult alone in the last few years. manwin's and the few other outfits that have been expanding haven't come close to hiring those numbers.

The same can be said for mainstream etc...

Yes, we both do. And so do all the people saying the internet will be hurt if we stop allowing people to steal freely. "What about my avatar? I could get sued? " Create your own fking Avatar. How bout that?

We can agree to disagree. But, I am not in favor of overreaching laws like 2257, and possibly SOPA. However, I don't make money hosting for thieves, or billing for thieves, or selling file locker memberships for thieves, so my perspective may be skewed in the minds of many.

Are we really afraid that someone is going to tell your host that you don't own your content. I can prove it quickly and effectively. If you can't you might really hate this law. If you know damn well its stolen, you are REALLY gonna hate this law.

What is your perspective U-Bob? Do you earn any income from uploaded content where the user may or may not be the legal owner? If not, what is your biggest concern? That someone reports you for stolen content that you legally own?

Now the accuser contacts the hosting company in Russia, and they tell me to blow it out my backside. They have 5 days to continue laughing at me, because they know I won't spend $100,000 to sue them. Also, Filesonic won't even tell me the name of the thief or shut down repeat offenders, but tells the thief who I am. Yeah, we don't want a law that hurts file lockers and thieves! Let's just keep it the way it is. Give me a break!