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Congressman who wrote SOPA is a copyright violator

Posted by lufthans on · 4 comments
BoingBoing; By Mark Frauenfelder
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The congressman who wrote SOPA violated CC licensing by not giving attribution for a photo used on his site. The site starts off with "Thanks for visiting my site", so it appears to be his. The domain is a "people for" type of title, so the domain appears third party even though the content indicates it is the congressman's site. There's also a missing period on the top of the site at the end of the above quoted sentence, so maybe the grammar police will get the site taken down even though photographer DJ Schulte can't yet use SOPA to have it taken down.

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Comments (4)

Laws written by our lawmakers always exempt lawmakers from compliance with the law. Welcome to politics!
> Laws written by our lawmakers always exempt lawmakers from compliance with the law. Welcome to politics!

Well, IANAL, but I think only for actions associated with the office. Their web site probably wouldn't qualify.
It's pretty much par for the course, that these great promoters of "stronger copyright enforcement" and "more vigorous enforcement of 'intellectual property' rights" just can't conceive that such a course must logically and inevitably inconvenience them, as well.

As far as they're concerned, the "problem" is intrinsically and necessarily defined in terms of scofflaws -- ie. unprincipled "other people" who are somehow unfairly ripping them off. The possibility that what these "defenders" of IP "rights" are demanding is not only unrealistic and unreasonable, but most likely actually even counter-productive to the very purpose for which "Intellectual Property" was devised to accomplish in the first place , appears to be -- quite literally -- unthinkable.

From this perspective, draconian measures appear to be merely natural, measured responses to the problem as defined. The fact that these misconceived "solutions" cannot solve the problem, and likely serve to further exacerbate the problem (hence "logically" requiring even more draconian response in turn) continues to be overlooked and ignored, even in the face of mounting evidence against such approaches, and the cognitive dissonance created by this discrepancy only feeds the emotional commitment to escalating the response again and again.

- - -

The whole situation reminds me of the once popular medical treatment of "bleeding" the patient -- which was considered the "obvious way to treat the patient's ailment (which was understood to be an excess or imbalance one of the four "humours" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism) in the body. If the treatment failed to produce a cure, obviously more bleeding was called for. This led inevitably to the predictable conclusion that the treatment was a success, but the patient died.



The worst part of the copyright violation was that it was on his CAMPAIGN site... Blatent mercenary, that one,... And I'm ashamed to admit that I'm in the same political party. These "copyright protection" acts are completely bipartisan cronyism at their worst.

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