“Throughout the legislative process, we have met with groups and companies with different views on how to address rogue websites. Earlier this year, the Committee held a hearing on the problem of rogue websites at which the public interest group perspective was represented by the Center for Democracy and Technology. We also heard from Floyd Abrams—a well-known constitutional scholar—who affirmed that the Stop Online Piracy Act is constitutional under the first amendment and provides sufficient due process. And tomorrow, we will hear from a representative of Google, which opposes legislative efforts to rein in rogue websites. Assertions that the legislative process has been stacked against the opposition are inconsistent with the facts.

“This bill has strong bipartisan support in the House Judiciary Committee. The theft of America’s IP costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs. We must protect America’s intellectual property from rogue websites. The Stop Online Piracy Act helps stop the flow of revenue to rogue websites and ensures that the profits from American innovations go to American innovators.”

Property rights provide incentives to create information but they also provide incentives to hoard it prior to the award of protection. All-or-nothing rights, in particular, limit prior sharing. An unintended consequence is to slow, not has- ten, forward progress when innovation hinges on combining disparately owned private ideas.

Infringement of copyright provides injunctive relief as remedy. This permits copyright owners the use of take-it-or-leave-it offers as strategy. The trouble that results from such a hold-up strategy is that it allows the injunctive rights owner, when bargaining with a non-owner, to extract nearly the full value of any transaction (with full information it is full value.) For recombinant works, this affords the last negotiating rights holder undue influence much as the last negotiating landowner exercises undue bargaining power relative to other landowners in any effort to develop a multi-parcel tract of indistinguishable parcels of land. For works of modest value, such as a single sample of a song, image, or video, negotiation costs can vastly exceed market value. For transformative works, insignificant inclusions of lesser material can retard or reduce the progress of more valuable material as when the release of the movie 12 Monkeys was enjoined due to the appearance in several scenes of a copyrighted chair.

AT&T said the MLB app streams video from MLB's website, while SlingPlayer streams from the TV set-top box Slingbox. AT&T also said the company is only trying to ensure all users on its network get the best possible service.

"We're certainly not crippling any apps," an AT&T spokesman said. "This is an issue of fairness.... While we would like to support all video services across our network, the reality is that wireless networks simply lack the capacity to support customers streaming hours of cable, satellite or IPTV video programming to individual users."

This report focused in on a legitimate problem for both the film industry and the authorities as they try to tackle what is an ever increasing and profitable criminal activity. We feel the report outlined the laws surrounding the issue of film piracy adequately and that the interviewees from the film industry were entirely appropriate people to comment on the problem.

Impartiality is the cornerstone of all our output, and we feel this report was fully balanced in it's coverage of copyright theft.