If a friend lends you a record album has a theft occurred? Of course not.

If you record a copy of that album has a theft occurred? In the days of analog tape no one thought so. Now if you sold that tape to a third person -- YES certainly that is a crime.

If you play music or the Sunday game for a party of 10 at home is that a crime -- No.
If you play music or the Sunday game for a party of 100 at home is that a crime -- probably not but the NFL would likely say that it is.
What if at that party for 100 you charge $5 each to cover expenses, is that a crime -- yes.

The crime occurs when money is exchanged or when you try to pass someone elses work off as your own.
There are many ways content is exchanged without theft occurring.

well we are Censored on this board and we dont here any peeps from anyone?? Regardless what you say it is a Form of Censorship..

Does this apply to search engines who profit from advertising clicks returned during searches for this material? What about advertising placement on websites that allow upload and exchange of this material? A few years back a guy I knew used some file sharing client which had an ad banner on the GUI, so even this would appear to be an avenue for monetizing this kind of traffic.

A considerable part of the irritation with policing this kind of activity appears to be based on who is getting paid and who is losing money. Media publishers suing individuals for distribution infringements costs money for legal work and has public relations costs, completely ignoring any loses from the piracy. Meanwhile, the search engines and websites are getting paid out of all this traffic. Shifting the focus of enforcement back up the chain from individuals to facilitators serves a manifold purpose of working to eliminate profitability for the "middlemen" and making legal investments farther reaching by impacting thousands or millions of users, rather than a single individual. All this while avoiding negative publicity for suing old ladies and such.

Flip side is that the previously profitable "middlemen" are forced to pay the bills. Search engine companies will need new staff to ensure compliance with blacklists. Websites will need new staff to police user uploaded content for infringing material. For very active websites this could require a costly staff of hundreds. Slowing user upload activity would also work to ease volume pressures on review staff, at the expense of user complaint and losses in advertising click traffic.

The technical accounts of this bill are a boondoggle, working from the wrong angles on the technology side and resulting in an easily defeated or even dangerous user response. Not to mention apparently terrible structure on infringement claims and whatnot.

But I think the general ideas I mention above are the big picture thinking, looking toward the future.

I love how the general public outcry for this is against so instead they push it under the table and try to sneak it through.

That is your lobbyist dollars at work!

Yeah..

They are doing everything they can to censor and silence anyone who opposes it.

They are not allowing anyone who opposes the bill to speak at the hearings.They are actively trying to block all petitions sent by the people to their representatives asking them to vote against the bill from being allowed to be used or even given to the representative.

Democracy working at it's finest.

FYI...censorship is defined as gov't regulations. If a company, corporation, or person (oh I forgot, according to the Supreme Court those are all the same now) prevents you from saying or printing whatever you want, that's well within the law. You have the ability to just go somewhere else and do what you want there. The gov't won't stop you, but yadayadayada.com has no legal need to allow you to post what you want. You don't like it, find another website or start your own.

What's funny is that people increasingly see these corporations as mini-gov'ts, hence the calls of "censorship" or "violation of rights" or whatever. They're not a gov't...at least they shouldn't be and any TRUE gov't that allows it deserves what they get.


The Jedi Master

Best post I've read all day. Right on the money.