US House of Representatives Starts SOPA Discussion
“Last night I had a bad dream that a group of respectable middle-aged citizens who could not distinguish a domain name from an IP address tried to regulate the Internet. Then I woke up and saw that the legal committee was already holding hearings on SOPA, this is how yesterday’s columnist by Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post, published on the day of the resumption of the next marathon on the SOPA bill in the US House of Representatives, begins. - We saw exactly what we feared. For each person who knew a little about the question, there were three or four screaming opponents. They say the same thing: "I am not a nerd" or "I am not an expert, but they told me ...". If they were surgeons during the operation, the patient would have run away crying for a long time. But this is like a group of respectable lovers who have gathered to perform a heart operation near a patient who cannot move. “We have heard from the cinematographic association that it is the heart surgery that is needed here,” they happily say. “We're not going to cut good wiring, only bad ones are neurons, or whatever you call these damned things.”
The Legal Committee of the Lower House of the United States Parliament resumed the hearing on Thursday morning, live broadcasts and archived live broadcasts are available here .
Despite the vigorous criticism of the legislative initiative by the public, representatives of Internet businesses and technical specialists, unfortunately, the first day of the hearings showed that SOPA will receive approval from the legal committee without any problems.
For the whole day, the legal committee discussed several fragments of the bill and held several votes. All of them ended with an advantage of 12-22 votes in favor of the MPAA, the RIAA and their supporters lobbying for the new bill in parliament. This is a great advantage, because there are only 32 deputies in the committee.
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“It’s terrible to look at,” writes Alexander Petri in the Washington Post. “It could be funny: people who have not grown up on the Internet are trying to ask questions about technologies very slowly, stumbling over words like“ server ”and“ service ”, they look very funny. But it is impossible to laugh, because this time we are the object of the joke. ”
The questions of individual deputies about why the bill is being discussed in such a hurry, and why technical experts are not invited to the discussion, remained unanswered. The proposals of the deputies to soften the bill were hacked to the top. For example, the proposal to withdraw from the scope of the SOPA colleges and non-profit organizations received only 9 votes against 23.
The peaceful course of the hearings was interrupted for a long time only by an incident that was caused by Republican MP Steve King from Iowa: he tweeted that he was bored listening to MP Sheila Jackson Lee, so he spends time surfing the Internet. An hour later, this tweet caught the eye of MP Sheila Jackson Lee - and she arranged for the committee a small scandal with the use of an inappropriate word. Since such vocabulary can not be entered in the protocol, the moderators asked Sheila Jackson Lee to abandon the word, replacing it with a softer synonym. Sheila Jackson Lee refused to do this until MP Steve King apologized to the committee. Unfortunately, the Deputy King was not at the moment in the hall, and therefore the hearing was suspended for some time. In the end, MP Lee nevertheless agreed to replace in the protocol one of the words addressed to MP King with softer synonyms.
The rest of the hearing passed without incident. As already mentioned, all the votes ended in favor of the MPAA, RIAA and their supporters.
The Legal Committee of the Lower House of the United States Parliament resumed the hearing on Thursday morning, live broadcasts and archived live broadcasts are available here .
Despite the vigorous criticism of the legislative initiative by the public, representatives of Internet businesses and technical specialists, unfortunately, the first day of the hearings showed that SOPA will receive approval from the legal committee without any problems.
For the whole day, the legal committee discussed several fragments of the bill and held several votes. All of them ended with an advantage of 12-22 votes in favor of the MPAA, the RIAA and their supporters lobbying for the new bill in parliament. This is a great advantage, because there are only 32 deputies in the committee.
')
“It’s terrible to look at,” writes Alexander Petri in the Washington Post. “It could be funny: people who have not grown up on the Internet are trying to ask questions about technologies very slowly, stumbling over words like“ server ”and“ service ”, they look very funny. But it is impossible to laugh, because this time we are the object of the joke. ”
The questions of individual deputies about why the bill is being discussed in such a hurry, and why technical experts are not invited to the discussion, remained unanswered. The proposals of the deputies to soften the bill were hacked to the top. For example, the proposal to withdraw from the scope of the SOPA colleges and non-profit organizations received only 9 votes against 23.
The peaceful course of the hearings was interrupted for a long time only by an incident that was caused by Republican MP Steve King from Iowa: he tweeted that he was bored listening to MP Sheila Jackson Lee, so he spends time surfing the Internet. An hour later, this tweet caught the eye of MP Sheila Jackson Lee - and she arranged for the committee a small scandal with the use of an inappropriate word. Since such vocabulary can not be entered in the protocol, the moderators asked Sheila Jackson Lee to abandon the word, replacing it with a softer synonym. Sheila Jackson Lee refused to do this until MP Steve King apologized to the committee. Unfortunately, the Deputy King was not at the moment in the hall, and therefore the hearing was suspended for some time. In the end, MP Lee nevertheless agreed to replace in the protocol one of the words addressed to MP King with softer synonyms.
The rest of the hearing passed without incident. As already mentioned, all the votes ended in favor of the MPAA, RIAA and their supporters.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/134755/
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