Are SOPA Sponsors Violating SOPA Rules? Not So Fast, Says Ars Technica 115
TheNextCorner writes "Remember how the Stop Online Piracy Act would make streaming of copyrighted material a felony? Many of these lawmakers actually stream copyrighted videos on their websites." However, that's not the whole story. according to a followup at Ars Technica to the tweeted claims about streaming and SOPA. From which:
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation tweeted the post, and it was re-tweeted more than 100 times. So are the sponsors of SOPA hypocrites? We're not fans of SOPA, so we'd love to have this story check out. But we're also a news site, so we contacted James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at New York Law School, (and judging from his tweets, not a SOPA supporter) to get his expert opinion."
Not really the point (Score:5, Interesting)
The core issue is how SOPA changes the liability structure to permit endless copyright troll lawsuits. It doesn't matter if your users are or aren't infringing if copyright holders can sue you endlessly regardless.
USA is going nuts for Hollywood (Score:5, Interesting)
Go on america; keep on going, keep listening to the 1 % to try to get the rest of the world to do your bidding..
This is one of many steps that have been taken to make the USA look silly & this will only be one more step towards the downfall of the usa..
I used to be a big fan of the country; but i'm getting more & more convinced that the usa is nuts... & getting more & more so :)
in 10 years the usa will be disconnected from the internet.. at least; the free internet the rest of the world will enjoy.
Re:USA is going nuts for Hollywood (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed. The new media companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) will leave the country completely and move the USA operations bases to other countries.
Re:USA is going nuts for Hollywood (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's designed to survive a holocaust, the Internet can survive without America.
Unconstitutional. Period. (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, wait, I forgot that the Constitution, which used to be the supreme law of the land and could only be superceded by a 2/3 majority vote by the states, is just a goddamn piece of paper.
As you were.
Re:Not really the point (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They're getting it wrong! (Score:4, Interesting)
If SOPA had been in place when youtube was a small startup company, they'd have been blocked and killed. That would still happen to many startups. Today, though, youtube passes the bigness test - it won't be blocked. That would produce too much of an outrage.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not really the point (Score:5, Interesting)
The really awful thing about that is that the actual music to "Happy Birthday to You" isn't copyrighted, or at least shouldn't be under copyright. The melody is from "Good Morning to All", which was written in 1893. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the combination of the "Happy Birthday to You" lyrics and the "Good Morning to All" melody first appeared in print in 1912 and was copyrighted by people who clearly weren't the true originators in 1935 and, due to the various copyright extensions, won't fall out of copyright until 2030.
Now, the lyrics consist of 4 lines, only one of which is unique, and only barely, since it differs from the other three only by replacing "to you" with "dear ____". And there are only 5 actual words (aside from the person's name, which is clearly not a copyrightable part of the song). So, "Happy Birthday to You" is a clear example of a song that doesn't deserve to fall under copyright. If it ever went to court, the defendant would probably win, but very few people would ever fight it because the expense and effort involved wouldn't be worth it versus caving and handing over the protection money.