"4. Promote innovation over litigation. Our efforts should be to protect copyrights and trademarks, not outdated business models."<p>To me, that is the juiciest nugget in the article. From all appearances, the legislators arguing <i>for</i> SOPA and PIPA don't care too much about our complaints about potential legal abuse and curtailing of the rights of American citizens and companies.<p>I think stating it instead as a market issue might help, sort of like "SOPA is like something the buggy whip industry would have argued for."
Just because a congressman opposes SOPA doesn't make his statements magically profound. Although the direction of his statement is intelligent, his four points at the end are far too vague to be useful.<p>Phrases like "consider instead promoting approaches that empower users" and "promote innovation over litigation" are nice sound bites, but they're very "safe" opinions. No one's ever going to disagree with them. That makes them lose their usefulness, however, as proponents can easily twist logic to claim that SOPA satisfies those four points.<p>Not trying to disparage Wyden, but his statement here would be far more useful if it drew a clearer line in the dirt.