"We think we can write at least some clarifying language that would instruct the Copyright Office to more accurately define what is, in fact, fair use," Issa said in an interview [with Roll Call]. "People who make copies on their iPod for jogging are not the problem."

From: Teller, Paul
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2012 04:11 PM
Subject: RSC Copyright PB

We at the RSC take pride in providing informative analysis of major policy issues and pending legislation that accounts for the range of perspectives held by RSC Members and within the conservative community. Yesterday you received a Policy Brief on copyright law that was published without adequate review within the RSC and failed to meet that standard. Copyright reform would have far-reaching impacts, so it is incredibly important that it be approached with all facts and viewpoints in hand. As the RSC’s Executive Director, I apologize and take full responsibility for this oversight. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and a meaningful Thanksgiving holiday....

Paul S. Teller
Executive Director
U.S. House Republican Study Committee
Paul.Teller@mail.house.gov
http://republicanstudycommittee.com

Lachowicz uses salty language in some of the comments, but someone needs to sit the Maine GOP down and explain the difference between fantasy and reality. Every day, millions of people engage in simulated video game violence without committing any real-world violence. By suggesting a World of Warcraft hobby should disqualify someone for office—and implying that voters are too dumb to tell the difference between virtual and real violence—the party is only embarrassing itself.

It's worth noting that the average American watches more than 30 hours of television per week. Many other Americans spend their evenings and weekends at the golf course. Yet it's hard to imagine anyone suggesting that devoting 22 hours per week to those hobbies made a candidate too lazy to hold elected office.

[E]ven if every single U.S. producer is shut down, wouldn't foreign sites happily take up the slack? It's not like Americans have some great irreproducible national skills in smut-making, or like it takes a $100 million Hollywood budget to make a porn movie. Foreign porn will doubtless be quite an adequate substitute for the U.S. market. Plus the foreign distributors might even be able to make and distribute copies of the existing U.S.-produced stock — I doubt that the imprisoned American copyright owners will be suing them for infringement (unless the U.S. government seizes the copyrights, becomes the world's #1 pornography owner, starts trying to enforce the copyrights against overseas distributors, and gets foreign courts to honor those copyrights, which is far from certain and likely far from cheap).

The U.S. spends who knows how many prosecutorial and technical resources going after U.S. pornographers. A bunch of them get imprisoned. U.S. consumers keep using the same amount of porn as before.

Nor do I think that the crackdown will somehow subtly affect consumers’ attitudes about the morality of porn — it seems highly unlikely that potential porn consumers will decide to stop getting it because they hear that some porn producers are being prosecuted.

The government gets understandably outraged by the “foreign smut loophole.” “Given all the millions that we’ve invested in going after the domestic porn industry, how can we tolerate all our work being undone by foreign filth-peddlers?,” pornography prosecutors and their political allies would ask. So they unveil the solution, in fact pretty much the only solution that will work: Nationwide filtering.

It’s true: Going after cyberporn isn’t really that tough — if you require every service provider in the nation to block access to all sites that are on a constantly updated government-run “Forbidden Off-Shore Site” list. Of course, there couldn’t be any trials applying community standards and the like before a site is added to the list; that would take far too long. The government would have to be able to just order a site instantly blocked, without any hearing with an opportunity for the other side to respond, since even a quick response would take up too much time, and would let the porn sites just move from location to location every several weeks.

Finally, the government can go after the users: Set up “honeypot” sites (seriously, that would be the technically correct name for them) that would look like normal offshore pornography sites. Draw people in to buy the stuff. Figure out who the buyers are. To do that, you'd also have to ban any anonymizer Web sites that might be used to hide such transactions, by setting up some sort of mandatory filtering such as what I described in option (2).

Then arrest the pornography downloaders and prosecute them for receiving obscene material over the Internet, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1462; see, e.g.,United States v. Whorley (4th Cir. 2008) (holding that such enforcement is constitutional, and quite plausibly so holding, given the United States v. Orito Supreme Court case).

How can the government's policy possibly achieve its stated goals, without creating an unprecedentedly intrusive censorship machinery, one that's far, far beyond what any mainstream political figures are talking about right now?

Gingrich: "You are asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood? I am weighing it and thinking fondly of the many left wing people that I am so eager to protect. On the other hand, you have so many people that are technologically advanced such as Google and You Tube and Facebook that say this is totally going to mess up the Internet. The bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable. I believe in freedom and think that we have a patent office, copyright law and if a company believes it has generally been infringed upon it has the right to sue. But the idea that we have the government start preemptively start censoring the Internet and corporations' economic interest is exactly the wrong thing to do."

Romney: "The law as written is far too expansive, far too intrusive and far too threatening of freedom of speech and information carried across the Internet. It would have a depressing impact on one of the fastest growing industries in America. I care deeply about intellectual content going across the Internet and if we can find a way to very narrowly go after those people who are pirating especially those offshore. But a very broad law that gives the government the power to start saying who can pass what to whom, I say no and I am standing for freedom."

Paul: "I am one of the first Republicans to oppose this law and so glad that sentiment has mellowed up here as Republicans have been on the wrong side of this issue and this is a good example on why its good to have someone who can look at civil liberties ... freedom and the constitution bring people together."

Santorum: "I do not support this law and believe it goes too far. But I will not agree with everyone that there isn't something that should be done to protect the intellectual content of people. The internet is not a free zone where anyone can do anything they want to do and trample the rights of other people. Particularly when we are talking about entities off shore. The idea that the government has no role to protect the intellectual property of this company, that's not right. The idea that anything goes on the Internet? Who has that idea. Property rights should be respected."