<i>His comments arrive after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a study on Wednesday indicating that industries depending on IP rights account for more than $5 trillion of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). The country's total GDP is about $14.6 trillion.</i><p>I'm sure if you fumble around the arithmetics enough, and include anyone who produces or depends on anything that could fit under the increasingly vague label of "IP" (this company has a movie night every month, they depend on IP!), you can probably even boost that made-up number to 75% or 90% of GDP!
Virtually all the "screw the internet" bill founders turnaround and say something like this. I just goes to show that these guys are dummies or puppets for hollywood.<p>While hollywood pays, they throw try to screw up a lot of things as soon as the payment(s) stop, they turn around and admit crap like this - so tell me. What good does this guys admission of being stupid do to other bills like PIPA?
Beiber's cover songs on the Internet aren't illegal because of PIPA, they're illegal because of the current broken copyright system.<p>Unless Bieber got authorization from the rights holders, which is (I'm guessing) both impossible and something no 8 or 9 year old would try properly. (see also: this Wired article on the issue: <a href="http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/05/opinion-baio-criminal-creativity/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/05/opinion-baio-criminal...</a> )<p>In one way the PIPA protests were a resounding success. In another way, copyright laws in the US - regardless of PIPA - need some serious looking into.<p>When birthday parties everywhere violates copyright law (by singing the canonical Happy Birthday song), and face potentially large fines because of it, something's broken.
I think the scary thing is that these guys actually have the power to control the Internet, if the bill is approved.<p>While protesting is good, I hope there will also be a solution which takes away that power from them - so that anyone can put up a website without fear of being taken down (or of having RIAA knocking at his door for referring to a website which has link to some where else from where you can download a movie that no one else would anyway buy).
Taken at face value, it is blatant evidence that the bill was not properly examined before being pushed to vote.<p>Shame on legislators everywhere that follow the same pattern.<p>Of course face value probably does not entail all that may have been orchestraded out of sight.