Link: http://www.keepthewebopen.com/sopa

Ms. Adams,

I have written to you and called your office in the past to express my feelings regarding the passage of the misguided bill known as SOPA and it's cousin PIPA.

To be clear, I do acknowledge that there must be measures taken to stifle the blatant and unrepentant piracy of intellectual property. But having encountered the implementation of such measures in the past I must point out, for all of the hand wringing that the Intellectual Property (IP) owners have done in the past, all they have really succeeded in doing was limiting access to legal forms of entertainment for law abiding individuals and delaying the progress of technology.

I am and have been an electronic service technician specializing in television repair since 1978 and have watched as the studios made war against the electronic manufacturers during the advent of VHS and Beta home recording (Sony Corp v. Universal Studios Group) as well as the design and implementation of  high definition TV and the internet. Every step along the way the studios have cried that with each of these technological advances they might lose money and product to supposed pirates. Each and every time having lost in the courts and in the court of public opinion they have come to congress to protect their failed business model with new legislation limiting the implementation  and uses of these technologies.

But for all of this legal wrangling and crawfishing, the American people would have had high definition television 10 years earlier and DVDs or BlueRay technology much sooner.

As an example; there was the failed mandate that required that all high definition TVs contain a tamper-proof interlock preventing anyone from removing the back from their television, purportedly to prevent hooking physically to the signals in able to make an HD duplicate. To my knowledge very few of these TVs were actually produced and the only  thing that this prevented was the televisions owner from enjoying the use of their property when the circuit that controlled this feature eventually failed.

There was also the badly designed and useless broadcast flag provision which caused a whole generation of HD Televisions and computer equipment to never work as they were intended. The courts eventually ruled (American Library Association v FCC) that Broadcast flagging was unlawful and the FCC repealed this decision earlier this year.

Even the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is regularly used as a SLAP to stifle dissent or just maliciously by anyone who can fill out a form . Most recently there is a case of MegaUpload v. Univeral Entertainment group where MegaUpload asserts that Universal has filed fraudulent DMCA take down notices on property that they do not own. Universal has gone as far as filing DMCA takedown claims against valid news reporting of these events to squelch discussion. This is all very troubling.

The most appalling aspect of the whole thing is the lack of ANY coverage of this legislation by ANY of the major corporate news services.

And we want to pass a law giving entertainment lawyers the ability to wage war on the public internet?

Please Ms. Adams, ask more questions and do more research before unleashing a potentially devastating law on the ability of the American people to get the whole true story.

Any legislation must contain due process protections and severe civil and criminal penalties for fraudulent misuse of these laws as well as strict guidelines for their use.

Yours Truly,

Jimmersd