SOPA Opera – The Craziest Congressional Takes On Internet Piracy

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The recent congressional hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) generated a tidal wave of protest online, with startups censoring their homepages, drafting petitions and Tumblr sending an astonishing 87,000 phone calls to elected officials. But the hearing itself was less of a success. Many of the members of the House Judiciary Committee seemed amused, annoyed and downright dismissive of the anger emanating from the tech community. We gathered together some of their statements, both for and against, to give a flavor of how our lawmakers view online piracy.
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John Conyers - (D-Michigan)

"To those who say that a bill to stop online theft will break the Internet, I would like to point out, that’s not likely to happen. We’re getting a number of reactions from those in the tech sector who think this will strangle startups. I reluctantly ask to put this into the record: The attack of the internet killers, this is very serious business [laughing]. Don’t walk run, tell Congress there is a better way, SOPA threatens internet security, kills cloud computers, an American job crushing monster, that’s our bill. No this is serious - it’s a terrible thing, we aught to know better [laughing]."
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Ted Poe - (R - Texas)

“Back in my experience on the bench down at the courthouse, or the ‘palace of perjury,’ as I referred to it in those days, I saw a lot of thieves, and stealin’ is stealin’ and thieves are people we outta deal with... they're not bad actors, they're thieves! And this legislation is trying to get a grip on this... if you pull up, as I did, if you pull up on Google search engine The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, or Harry Potter, 'free Harry Potter movies' or 'free The Grinch That Stole Christmas,' you get a lot of free sites on there. And as a consumer I can’t tell who’s a thief and who’s not a thief! And I know Google is doing a lot, millions of sites, I’ve heard the testimony, but at the point we’re at now, what can Google offer to this bill that Google would sign onto specifically? … You pull up The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and just keep going page after page of free Grinches!”
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Mark Amodei (R-Nevada)

"The impacts are instantaneous. Once it's downloaded, it's gone. That horse is out of the barn and its never coming back. And when you have a broken leg, you need to go to the hospital... and unfortunately you [Google] are in the medical business on this stuff. So I can just tell you that my concern is this: you are a major operational piece of this. The criminal activities are uncontroverted that are happening and to do nothing is wrong.”
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Ted Deutch (D-Florida)

“This notion that we're going to break the Internet, that somehow we're going to stifle innovation, the fact that the kid serving me coffee at Starbucks told me, ‘Hey, I heard you're taking up legislation that's going to make it impossible for me to download music,’ the fact is, what we're worried about and the reason we're having this discussion is not to stifle that innovation in the future. I don’t believe the legislation does that. But we know right now if we do nothing that the film industry and those young directors that are starting out aren’t going to be able to do their craft and we're not going to have the next Adele and we're not going to have the next Drake because they aren't going to be compensated for their work.”
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William Goodlatte - (R-Virginia)

"Some have argued that this legislation would 'break' the Internet. "As the co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus, that's the last thing I want to do. Can you explain how this legislation would impact the functioning of the Internet?"
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Tom Marino - (R-Pennsylvania)

“I want to thank Google for what it did for child pornography, getting off the website. I was a prosecutor for 18 years and I find it commendable and I put those people away. So if you can do that for child pornography, why can you not do that for these rogue websites? And I follow that up with, why not hire some whiz kids out of college to come in to monitor this and work for the company to take these off? My daughter who is 16 and my son is 12, we love to get on the Internet and we download music and we pay for it, and I get to a site and I get to a new one and I say, ‘This is good we can get some music here’ and my daughter says, ‘Dad, don't go near that one, that's illegal, it's free and given the fact that you're on Judiciary I don’t think you should be doing that.’”
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Melvin Watt (D - North Carolina)

Asking Google representative, Katherine Oyama, if her company would consider banning links to certain sites: "Does that mean you consider it unconstitutional for law enforcement to seize a child pornography site, if the site also contains a copy of the King James bible? Are you saying first amendment rights won’t allow that? What about if it contains 20 copies of the King James Bible, just it's still 90 percent child pornography? Are you saying First Amendment Rights won't allow us to do that?"
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Louie Gohmert (R-Texas)

"There are thieves using the internet, and I keep hearing from people who say, 'Look, if it were illegal for me to use that free website then how come i get access so easily?' ... I can give you an example. I know what the law is. I had an 8-track, "Warm Shade of Ivory," Henry Mancini, back in college and it got me through some all-nighters, that and Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s soundtrack. So anyway, Sleepless in Seattle has the song "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" and I wanted to get that, I wanted to download it. I'd pay two bucks for it! Not just 99 cents. Nobody has it except free websites. I knew not to go use those and download it free because it's illegal. Most people don't."
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Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas)

"One of the kind of groups I've been engaged in over the last couple of months is the generation of youth that are excited about startups. They are everywhere! They are job creators. I see them as the next nucleus of job creation in America. They're obviously functioning now. They're all trying to emulate the stars of The Social Network. We know that won't be the case, but they are trying to create jobs."
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Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee)

"My first thought is that it doesn't seem that there should be that much difference between what the Google folks and the techie folks are wanting and what the MPAA and RIAA and the other AAs want. Lemme ask maybe the gentleman from motion pictures--who's apparently got a Rick Perry problem with not being able to count to something--Mr. O'Leary [Michael O'Leary, Senior Executive Vice President, Global Policy and External Affairs, MPAA]. Have ya'll not gotten together and tried to work this out? Some way to fine tune where there are people being penalized that are not guilty and sites being shut down where there's just a small infringement?"
"There are a couple of search engines in China and Russia. Yandex is I think is one of them and Baidu [shrugs] and some consider these rogue sites, whether they are or not, I don't know, they could be. If they were considered such and they were blocked because they had some pirate-type folks among their constituency, how do you think the Chinese and Russians would respond towards your company [Google] and towards the United States companies?"

Comments

MSgtGunny says:

November 22, 2011 at 5:18 pm

@Mark Amodei, trying to hold google responsible for things means you will have to ban liqour stores from selling a certain brand because someone did something against the law while drinking said alcohol, it just doesn’t work.
GrinfishyB says:

November 22, 2011 at 6:30 pm

I can’t believe this is the only place I could find a meaningful portion of this debate transcribed. I do have to note a mistake in the quote from Conyers. Conyers, in parodying SOPA opposition, doesn’t say that SOPA “kills, clogs computers.” No, he suggests it “kills
cloud computer.” Not the cloud computer!
1. Nitasha Tiku says:
  
  November 22, 2011 at 6:39 pm
  
  NOT THE CLOUD! Fixed. Thanks for catching.
taggrinc says:

November 23, 2011 at 12:02 am

What I think is funny about Congressman Deutch using Adele and Drake as examples is that they got their success in the age of the broken music industry. People were worried 10-15 years ago that artists wouldn’t be able to be successful if music sharing was stopped or controlled. Seems like artists are still succeeding. Adele’s career started by putting up her demos on Myspace. If she tried that 10-15 years ago with the traditional music business model would she have been as successful?
TheVoiceOfReason says:

January 19, 2012 at 11:53 pm

I feel ashamed of Ted Poe being my representative now…

BetaBeat

SOPA Opera – The Craziest Congressional Takes On Internet Piracy

John Conyers - (D-Michigan)

Ted Poe - (R - Texas)

Mark Amodei (R-Nevada)

Ted Deutch (D-Florida)

William Goodlatte - (R-Virginia)

Tom Marino - (R-Pennsylvania)

Melvin Watt (D - North Carolina)

Louie Gohmert (R-Texas)

Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas)

Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee)

Comments

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John Conyers - (D-Michigan)

Ted Poe - (R - Texas)

Mark Amodei (R-Nevada)

Ted Deutch (D-Florida)

William Goodlatte - (R-Virginia)

Tom Marino - (R-Pennsylvania)

Melvin Watt (D - North Carolina)

Louie Gohmert (R-Texas)

Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas)

Steve Cohen (D-Tennessee)

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