News

RIAA Head Still Fighting Hard For SOPA And PIPA

11:21 a.m. · February 8, 2012 · by Andrew Winistorfer

Remember how last month it seemed like the internet community had struck a blow against the RIAA and other copyright organizations when the Senate and the House tabled SOPA and PIPA, two acts hell-bent on ruining the internet for everyone? Well, the RIAA is still mad about that. So mad that their Chief Executive Cary Sherman wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times that promised the RIAA will still support PIPA and SOPA, and is still going to be pushing for a bill similar to them. The whole thing is on some scary big, bad CEO stuff, with him saying stuff about how he's really just trying to protect Americans from theft by blocking websites that give away Katy Perry Mp3s (more or less). Here's a sampling of what this dude said:

While no legislation is perfect, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (or PIPA) was carefully devised, with nearly unanimous bipartisan support in the Senate, and its House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA), was based on existing statutes and Supreme Court precedents. But at the 11th hour, a flood of e-mails and phone calls to Congress stopped the legislation in its tracks. Was this the result of democracy, or demagoguery?

Misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works. Consider, for example, the claim that SOPA and PIPA were “censorship,” a loaded and inflammatory term designed to evoke images of crackdowns on pro-democracy Web sites by China or Iran. Since when is it censorship to shut down an operation that an American court, upon a thorough review of evidence, has determined to be illegal? When the police close down a store fencing stolen goods, it isn’t censorship, but when those stolen goods are fenced online, it is? Wikipedia, Google and others manufactured controversy by unfairly equating SOPA with censorship. They also argued misleadingly that the bills would have required Web sites to “monitor” what their users upload, conveniently ignoring provisions like the “No Duty to Monitor” section.

The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power.

Yikes. He gets more out of control over here. The fight is far from over folks. [DS]