The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing today on the "Stop Internet Piracy Act" (aka SOPA). In typical Republican fashion, it was not broadcast on CSPAN and many interested parties were excluded from the proceedings. In fact, the only technology company allowed to testify was Google, who opposes the proposed law along with a coalition of companies which includes Facebook, eBay and Zynga, along with others.

If ever there were a law designed to fatten the pockets of intellectual property attorneys, it is this proposed law. It has the potential to change the Internet, and not for the better. Written by and for large media companies like Comcast, it places full responsibility for intellectual property piracy on the shoulders of site owners rather than users.

As currently written, any website that quoted another site's content, or linked to a site that quoted another site's content could be declared a rogue site by the content owner, whether or not that content is subject to fair use rules. Once declared "rogue", companies like Paypal and Visa could then cut off payments immediately without the benefit of a hearing or due process of law. Fair use? Free speech? Forget about it. Here is the official summary from the House Judiciary Committee site.

This bill focuses not on technology but on preventing those who engage in criminal behavior from reaching directly into the U.S. market to harm American consumers.

We cannot continue a system that allows criminals to disregard our laws and import counterfeit and pirated goods across our physical borders.

Nor can we fail to take effective and meaningful action when criminals misuse the Internet.
The problem of rogue websites is real, immediate and wide-spread. It harms all sectors of the economy.

And its scope is staggering. One recent survey found that nearly one quarter of global Internet traffic infringes on copyrights.

A second study found that 43 sites classified as ‘digital piracy’ generated 53 billion visits per year and that 26 sites selling just counterfeit prescription drugs generated 51 million hits annually.

Since the United States produces the most intellectual property, our country has the most to lose if we fail to address the problem of these rogue websites.

Responsible companies and public officials have taken note of the corrosive and damaging effects of rogue sites.

That last line is dripping with finger-pointing, as the announcement goes on to extol the virtuous Mastercard company while excoriating Google. Mastercard, of course, supports this wholeheartedly, while Google opposes it, along with Facebook and other websites. The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that sites like Vimeo, Flickr and Etsy would likely die as a result of this legislation.

Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN reporter and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, had this to say:

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It was disappointing to hear Bill Maher refer to Andrew Breitbart as a "journalist" last night. He isn't one, and calling him that is an insult to every journalist everywhere. Journalism requires the kind of integrity Breitbart utterly lacks:

Andrew Breitbart is a known news fabricator. Any material originating through his websites should be considered suspect at best, and subjected to thorough fact-checking before it can be reported on by anyone in any case.

Legitimate bloggers should avoid linking to his websites. Bloggers and other new media content creators who work for Breitbart, or who post to his sites, should be considered fruit of a poisonous tree.

Breitbart himself should be considered unfit for news. If it is absolutely necessary to report on him, Breitbart should be identified primarily as “known fabricator” — not a ‘journalist,’ ‘entertainer,’ ‘website mogul,’ or any other such title.

What Breitbart and his cohort of right-wing "new media" voices do is propaganda. They make nontroversy into outrage, or make crap up when they lack nontroversy. It is media pollution. It is poisonous to democracy.

Maher has diminished himself in elevating Breitbart, who returned the favor by telling his host "you're not libertarian, you're socialist." The fabricator's entire web empire is characterized by this sort of Overton Window-yanking insanity. You cannot find a single mention of Iraq or Afghanistan contracting scandals on his sites, for example, but you can find the latest ginned-up outrage over White House Christmas ornaments or an NEA conference call in between the Victoria Jackson posts.

If Breitbart published such ravings behind a tabloid cover of Batboy or Elvis sightings or world's fattest couple to wed, we would be able to laugh. Instead, Breitbart presents fiction as truth, which isn't funny or thrilling. There is no laughing at how Breitbart, Hannah Giles, and James O'Keefe III smeared ACORN, taking down the largest and most-successful anti-poverty organization in America at the height of a recession even though no one at any ACORN office did anything illegal. Major media swallowed the hoaxers' narrative whole although the hoax videos themselves disprove it.

Those ACORN workers might have been anyone; when Breitbart escaped serious repercussions from the media, he went on to slime Shirley Sherrod. Maher's friendly treatment only encourages him to commit further acts of character assassination from which no one is safe.

Scarborough and the Scum Sucking Bottom Feeder

TRACY CONNOR
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Prepaid cards that unlock one of the raunchiest X-rated sites on the Internet are being peddled by bodegas and newsstands across the city - even to underage kids, the Daily News has learned.

On Scarborough Country last night, Tracy Connor talked about how she broke the story. transcripts here

Joe, the crack interviewer that he is, asked this riveting question.

SCARBOROUGH: And why would somebody go out and buy these porn cards? What is the attraction of them?

Well Joe, the answer is, it's porn!

CONNOR: Well, normally, you have got to give your credit card information to get on to an Internet pornography site.

Penny Nance of the Kids First Coalition had some choice words for Peter Shankman, spokesman for the Pre-Paid Porn Card

SCARBOROUGH: Penny, did you call—is it true that you called these people in the pre-interview scum-sucking bottom-feeders?

NANCE: Hey, I might have said that, but I meant it in the nicest way possible.

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SHANKMAN: I have yet to see—I have yet to—I‘m sorry. I didn‘t interrupt while you were calling me a scum-sucking bottom-feeder.

Inside Politics:

Woodruff: As we reported a little while ago in our blog segment, the Internet is abuzz with reaction to comments by New York Democratic Congressman Maurice Hinchey. The congressman over the weekend shared his views about the now disputed CBS News report about President Bush's Air National Guard service. Representative Maurice Hinchey is with me now, he joins us from Albany, New York.

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REP. MAURICE HINCHEY (D), NEW YORK: And then the issue of the CBS Dan Rather event came up, and I said that there were false documents or documents which were falsified and presented as being accurate and there was a question as to where those documents came from. And in the context of the discussion I suggested that -- my theory was that I wouldn't be surprised if it came from the White House political operation, headed up by Karl Rove.

More from Digby: It's Irresponsible Not To As Peggy Noonan so memorably wrote about the "little Elian" drama:

Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro’s intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Michele Malkin on Hinchey here. LGF here

Swifties Slime Again

Dowd

Instead of trying to destroy AARP, Republicans should be signing up the seniors' lobby to find Osama.

AARP's super-relentless intelligence network is certainly better than that doddering C.I.A's. Osama has to have turned 50, and AARP somehow knows where everyone who has turned 50 lives.

It began with an almost comically hyperbolic Internet ad that briefly ran on The American Spectator's Web site, painting AARP as pro-gay sex - even though it's tough to think of AARP and steamy lust in the same hot breath - and anti-soldier. It showed a soldier with a red X across him, and two gay men kissing at their nuptuals, with the headline "The REAL AARP Agenda."

(Mr. Jarvis, who used to be executive vice president of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, also urged his Web site readers to "support Mel Gibson's 'The Passion.' " The group's national chairman is Art Linkletter; it seems that aging right-wing trash-talkers say the darndest things.) read on

Stick to the facts Chris!

The "Chris Matthews Show" on Sunday night turned from a somewhat objective venture into an exercise in the misuse of facts. Can the host of a show at least be able to interpret simple arithmetic?

Using a Pew research Poll conducted on Nov 11:

People who watched Fox News: 71% voted Bush 22% voted Kerry.

Listened to radio: 62% voted Bush 36% voted Kerry.

Watched Big Three Networks: 43% voted Bush 50% voted Kerry

Internet: 53% voted Bush 43% voted Kerry

Read newspapers: 45% voted Bush 50% voted Kerry

Matthews: There's some strange parallelism out there. Cable news and radio (talk) radio is conservative, newspapers and broadcast news is liberal.

Is that a republican talking point?

Also while making that statement, didn't Matthews indict his own network as being conservative?

Tucker Carlson pointed out that he thought more viewers on CNN voted for John Kerry.

How does Matthews arrive at that conclusion looking at the facts in front of him? If anything this poll showed that Fox News and talk radio, which is dominated by Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage are skewed heavily to a conservative audience, while newspapers and Broadcast news are much more balanced in it's viewership. The surprising number was the Internet. Conservatives often complained how hostile the internet was to Bush during the campaign, while the after hours online polling that cast John Kerry as the clear winner in all three debates, "was misleading."

Exit, Stage Right GOP Wants to End Exit Polls

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wants to eliminate exit polls because he says they're not accurate, implying that the final vote was unquestionably correct. directly by major news organizations themselves. "But with the Internet today, we're kidding ourselves, aren't we, to think that everybody in America doesn't know what the exit data is showing?" he said.

He also said he was personally affected by the early reports, discouraged by what he was seeing. "But I've been through this before," he said. "In 2000 the exit data was wrong on Election Day. In 2002, the exit returns were wrong on Election Day. And in 2004, the exit data were wrong on Election Day -- all three times, by the way, in a way that skewed against Republicans and had a dispiriting effect on Republican voters across the country."

Sheldon Drobny: "There's a huge difference between polling what WILL happen and polling something that has already happened. The reliability of polling something that has already happened is highly reliable vs. predictive polls, like Gallup or Zogby, which is very risky. The reliability can be, not plus or minus 4 percent as we see with predictive polls, but rather a much more reliable plus or minus one half or one tenth of one percent with exit polls, because those are based on asking people who already voted. I would even say that if the exit polling were done in the key precincts of Florida and Ohio, which it was, then these results should be practically "bullet proof.'"

If the GOP eliminates exit polls before true verifiable voting is in place, there will be nothing left to warn us when our vote is stolen. Lastly, note that Gillespie only refers to the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections -- all the major elections since George W. Bush dropped onto the national political scene -- as "being skewed against Republicans."

Keith Olbermann on Voter Irregularities: Part 4

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Olbermann interviews Joe Trippi about the role of the internet in this process.

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Fahrenheit’ to air on Internet Monday

LOS ANGELES - Audiences will get another opportunity to view Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” on the eve of the elections when video-on-demand firm CinemaNow will make the controversial documentary available Monday via the Internet.

A little over a week ago I delved into a troubling topic: Why are so many civil rights groups and members of the Congressional Black Caucus opposing net neutrality? It seemed strange to me that leaders in communities of color would be echoing discredited telecommunications industry talking points.

For those not familiar with the term "net neutrality," it describes the rules and practices that currently keep the Internet a free and open communication medium. Net neutrality guarantees that blogs, small businesses, and organizations are on a level playing field with the largest corporations. Whether you're GM or an individual, the content you put online is accessible and delivered in the same way, with the same priority, and nothing is blocked. For communities of color, net neutrality is key. It keeps barriers to Internet entrepreneurship low so that anyone with a good idea and some technical savvy can join the 21st century economy.

Predictably, the major players in the broadband industry have been fighting the FCC's efforts to adopt rules that would solidify net neutrality principles into law, because scrapping net neutrality would enable them to make even more money by creating new revenue streams. Ironically, civil rights leaders and CBC members have joined the dominant players. Their stated reasoning: the belief that net neutrality rules could hurt efforts to close the digital divide. The problem is that, as far as I can see, the argument doesn't hold water. It falls apart whether you approach it from the perspective of business, common sense, or history.

My hope in writing my first post was that it might encourage civil rights leaders who have opposed or questioned net neutrality to publicly explain their positions. Given what's at stake, I think its incumbent on leaders opposing or questioning net neutrality to publicly make clear why. Unfortunately, none have done so.

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