Hacker News Reader

Comment by boredguy8 | Hacker News Reader

Zoe Lofgren's statements were really good, and her criticisms of the way the hearing was structured (5 for, 1 against, no engineers) were compelling. Her question of, "How many sites would you want to see taken down?" and the dodging is telling, too.

And Darrell Issa did a phenomenal job calling into question the need for the legislation because of the function of the ITC & usefulness of administrative law solutions already in place.

Wow, Dennis Ross (R-FL) apparently doesn't understand that free speech protections apply to the GOVERNMENT, not to business. "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech..." So yes, when Google takes down a site, it's not unconstitutional. When the government does it, in some instances, that is unconstitutional.

View on HN

I completely agree. Mr. Watts was embarrassing to watch -- his slanted opinion and childish domination of the dialogue was less than coy. I grew sick to my stomach listening to him constantly derail Oyama's statements. He kept demanding terse answers to questions that hardly had any relevance to the matter at hand and only served to make her seem clueluess.

Lofgren came on like a breath of fresh air. Not only did she actually seem INFORMED on the matter, but she did well to reveal that the opposition to this bill is not comprised of greedy tech companies who fear they would lose business, but all walks of Americans who are afraid that this would negatively impact our lives and our economy.

*edits for clarity

I agree on those two, but unfortunately I haven't heard much encouraging come from anyone else. Two people on a 38-member committee is not a strong showing...

Any political action that can restrict the behavior of business is crippled in advance.

Not so. The Republicans have a large majority in the House at present and the SOPA bill was introduced by the chairman of this committee. That's why the hearing is tilted unusually heavily in favor of the proponents. 'Business' includes all the tech companies who are lobbying uphill against SOPA as well.

The tech companies lobbying uphill are copyright consumers in this context. They are users, and the copyright owners' interests are those being prioritized, and whose interests have been favored in the entire SOPA (and before) movement. That the hearings are tilted in favor of copyright owners is simply public evidence of structural bigotry.

Yeah, like at my firm we used to use capital punishment for motivation but then we were told that we couldn't because of the law so I became a libertarian.

Darrell Issa did a phenomenal job calling into question the need for the legislation

That's refreshing; I'm not always a fan of this guy's work, but I fully agree that this is unnecessary regulation intended to violate the rights of individuals to boost the pockets of the corporate state.

Some instances?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com