Via TheHill.com:
Former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), now the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), on Tuesday pushed back at criticism his industry is backing an online piracy bill that would lead to censorship online.
Chris Dodd was once a beloved senator. Now he's a toadie. Let's see what kind of disingenuous statement he'll make today.
“Hollywood is pro-Internet. We stand with those who strongly oppose foreign governments that would unilaterally block websites and thus deny the free flow of information and speech," Dodd said in a speech at the Center for American Progress.
If Hollywood really was "pro-Internet" they would embrace it and change their business model accordingly. Instead, they see it as a threat to their business model, and like so many ignorant fools before them, they are trying to destroy that which they don't understand. With every new innovation that comes along, the entertainment industry starts to look more and more like a group of obsolete relics of a bygone era. Let us remember that this is the same industry that tried to ban the VCR and the cassette tape.
"So I want to make it clear right at the outset that our fight against content theft is not a fight against technology. It is a fight against criminals.”
If SOPA really was about fighting criminals, wouldn't the language be more specific? Sure, they recently changed up the language with an amendment, but now it just looks more like PROTECT IP, which is just as bad. This bill cannot be fixed. It must be killed.
Dodd denied that the bill would lead to censorship, citing a recent study by Envisional that found nearly a quarter of Internet traffic is copyright-infringing.
There are so many problems with that Envisional study I won't even bother listing them all, so instead, here's a link to a story detailing the problems.
“Attacking international content theft is not about restricting speech. Quite the opposite. Just as the Constitution defends an artist’s right to create, copyright protections defend the artist’s ability to do so,” Dodd said.
The original intent of copyright was to protect artists from plagiarism, that is, passing off another person's work as your own, but it was eventually corrupted by greedy middlemen who wanted to protect their obscene profits.
“There is a difference between believing that the Internet should be free and open and believing that just because something’s on the Internet, it should be free.”
And now Chris Dodd is trying to perform some deceitful wordplay. Laws like SOPA pose a grave threat to the free and open nature of the internet. No one will invest in the next YouTube if they know that one complaint is all it takes for it to be shut down.
Finally, all of Chris Dodd's talk about being "pro-Internet" is nullified by what he said just a few days prior.
"When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn't do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites."
Is this really what he wants the American government to do. Create their own version of the Great Firewall of China?
As a bit of an aside, you know SOPA is bad if even the Cato Institute is against it.