If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.”

This is terrifying to watch. It would be amusing — there’s nothing like people who did not grow up with the Internet attempting to ask questions about technology very slowly and stumbling over words like “server” and “service” when you want an easy laugh. Except that this time, the joke’s on us.

• Huge kudos to Reps. Issa, Lofgren, Chaffetz and Polis, who combined to repeatedly point out the problems of the bill and to argue forcefully and compellingly about why we needed to fix these problems. That much of the rest of the Committee ignored these concerns, played them down, or rejected them for silly or nonsense reasons, is really just a statement on the sad state of Congress today.
• I heard from sources that a big time content industry lobbyist was seen hanging out in the "members only" area during the session. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about what's going on, then you're not paying attention.
• There was a bizarre elementary school-like fight that went on at one point. Rep. Steve King tweeted early on:

  We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson has so bored me that I'm killing time by surfing the Internet.

  Rep. Jackson-Lee found out about this and announced that she was "offended," at which point it seemed like a bunch of these old clueless men started arguing about how inappropriate it was for her to say she was offended. The whole session had to pause while they talked to a "parliamentarian" about whether it was okay to use the term "offended," eventually leading Jackson-Lee to change her statement. Yeah. These are the people in charge of making our laws. Scary.
• With the session going on for 11.5 hours, there was a short break for lunch, but for dinner Rep. Lamar Smith offered "four kinds of pizza," but apparently only for other members. Staffers had to sit and starve. Nice of them, huh?

It is estimated that intellectual property (IP) intensive industries provide jobs to more than 19-million Americans and account for more than 60 percent of US exports. Despite this enormous positive impact, these industries endure tremendous losses at the hands of increasingly organized and sophisticated foreign-based counterfeiters and pirates.

A February 2011 Frontier Economics report[1] estimates the total value of counterfeit and pirated goods in 2008 and projects the impact in 2015. In 2008, the report concludes the total global economic value of counterfeit and pirated products to the G20 economies alone ranged from $455 to $650 billion annually. The report notes this estimate was likely to be “conservative” for years beyond 2008 “given the rapid increase in counterfeiting and piracy observed between 2005 and 2008.” The report projects the impact could rise to $1,220 to $1,770 billion in 2015.

On the subject of digital piracy, Frontier found digitally pirated music, movies and software accounted for between $30 billion and $75 billion in value in 2008 and estimated an impact of between $80 billion and $240 billion in 2015.

An earlier Frontier study entitled “The Impact of Counterfeiting on Governments and Consumers” concludes that “approximately 2.5 million jobs have been destroyed by counterfeiting and piracy”[3] across the G20 economies. The report adds that no attempt was made to measure the secondary impacts of employment in G20 economies (i.e., suppliers, retailers and other sectors in the supply chain) or the impact on non-G20 economies.

Two other recent studies provide new insight into the scope of infringing traffic on the global Internet as well as the scale and complexity of the online counterfeiting and piracy problem. In the first, a report[4] finds that nearly one quarter (23.8%) of global Internet traffic infringes on the trademark or copyrights of intellectual property right holders. The report also estimates that approximately two-thirds of BitTorrent traffic was illegitimately shared content.

The second report[5] surveyed 22 legitimate trademarked brands revealing that sites offering pirated content and counterfeit goods generated 53-billion visits a year. In a release, the study‟s authors note that “[g]iven the large number of popular brands, it is reasonable to assume that hundreds of thousands of other rights-holders, brands and content creators are suffering the same damage.”

According to the report, “domains classified as „digital piracy‟ attracted the highest levels of traffic with a high in excess of 32-million daily visits on average for the most trafficked domain – rapidshare.com. On an annual basis, that traffic equates to more than 11.8 billion visits per year for that site.” The report further states that the “three [most-trafficked] digital piracy sites generate more than 21-billion visits per year.”

As damaging and extensive as digital piracy is to IP right holders, the harm is not confined to companies. The “2010 Digital Music and Movies Report: The True Cost of Free Entertainment”, which was conducted by security technology company, McAfee, reveals a growing number of cyber threats associated with “free” online music and videos. For instance, the researchers determined that searches for free music ringtones resulted in a 300-percent increase in the riskiness[6] of sites returned by major search engines. Searches for “MP3s” and “free MP3s” resulted in even greater risks.

The harms caused by digital piracy don't take into account the human suffering inflicted by dangerous counterfeit goods sold over the Internet. A March 2011 report by the US Government‟s Counterfeit Pharmaceutical Inter-Agency Working Group warned of the increasing challenges posed by thousands of websites that peddle harmful and/or counterfeit drugs or drug without a valid prescription in violation of federal law.

In addition to the obvious harms to consumers posed by criminals who traffic in counterfeit pharmaceuticals, health and safety concerns also negatively affect our men and women who serve in uniform as well. A 2010 GAO study revealed an alarming risk of counterfeit products entering the military supply chain and creating substantial danger to service-members

Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) John Morton said “counterfeit and pirated goods present a triple threat to America. They rob Americans of jobs and their innovative ideas; fuel organized crime; and create a serious public safety risk. Counterfeiting has evolved to such a great extent that intellectual property thieves will sell just about anything that will make them a buck, with no regard for the integrity of the federal supply chain or the safety of our war fighters.”

A January 2010 study by the U.S. Department of Commerce estimated that counterfeit aircraft parts were “leading to a 5 to 15 percent annual decrease in weapons systems reliability.” The Commerce Department study, which surveyed military manufacturers, contractors, and distributors, reported approximately two and a half times as many incidents of counterfeit electronics in 2008 as in 2005. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in March 2010 that a supplier who sold a package containing a personal computer circuit as a $7,000 counterfeit circuit for a missile guidance system had been paid $3 million as part of contracts worth a total of $8 million.

Based on existing civil and criminal authorities, ICE has seized 350 U.S.-based[10] domain names that were investigated by ICE and ordered by federal judges to be seized after a showing the site is operating[11] in violation of criminal copyright or trademark laws. At least 86 of the domain names seized by ICE have been forfeited to the U.S. government. One foreign-owned site, Rojadirecta.com, which streams unlicensed and unauthorized sports programming over the Internet, has challenged the seizure of its domain name in federal district court.

These operations are not without critics. Some maintain ICE has overreached in this and related enforcement actions that involve child pornography investigations.

In response to concerns that H.R. 3261 may violate the First Amendment, the first provision in the bill, Section 2(a)(1), guarantees that the Act shall be applied in a manner that does not impose a prior restraint on free speech or the press. Constitutional scholar Floyd Abrams has also provided a detailed analysis of the free speech and due process implications of the bill and found it to be in complete accord with the Constitution and the rules that govern all civil litigation in US federal district court. A copy of his November 7, 2011, letter is on file with the Committee

In response to arguments that protecting American consumers and the US market from counterfeit and pirated goods delivered via the Internet establishes a dangerous precedent for repressive foreign regimes, the sponsors note that there is no moral equivalence between a US court issuing an order to enjoin continuing criminal activity and protect private property rights in full accord with the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution and a foreign regime that denies fundamental human rights to its citizens.

Finally, in response to assertions that permitting a federal district judge to authorize a service provider to apply the DNS solution to not deliver users to criminally-infringing websites, the sponsors note that Internet Service Providers already use this technique to ensure that subscribers do not gain access to websites that are associated with malware, spyware, viruses, child pornography or other unsafe or undesirable material.