So if I dug through a bunch of environmental activists' trash and found a stray recyclable would that be an indictment of mandatory recycling laws? The only thing thing interesting about this article is how easy it is to use SOPA as cheap link bait.
If the same activists were advocating laws allowing them to go through other people's garbage looking for recyclables, with disproportionate fines or the suspension of all municipal services as the penalty for violation, then yes.
Government agents there are empowered to root through private citizens' trash without probable cause, to search for recyclables. Additionally they put small computers on private trash cans, to monitor their movements -- to continue the analogy: it would be as if SOPA mandated government spyware on your hard drive.
Is anyone under the impression that if SOPA had passed this example would have lead to Apple pursuing an infringement action under it against NBC Universal, who happens to be a big Apple partner, over the misappropriation of an icon? There are plenty of very good arguments against SOPA and PIPA - it's easy to find them, they were/are bad laws. But is a single example of a non-willful violation that they'll be happy to remedy one of them? Not really.
Definitely, Apple would not go after NBC for this, nor should they. But I'm incredibly uncomfortable with laws that are this open to abuse, even with the assurance that those laws are absolutely necessary and will only be used against the worst violators. Think of the DMCA, RICO laws, eminent domain.
I agree - I think no matter the intent wide open laws like these are ripe for abuse. My only point here was that nextweb was just leveraging people's dislike of SOPA to get pageviews on something that is clearly a non-issue. If you want people to behave like adults (and pass adult laws) it makes sense to keep the discourse at that level.
I'm sure we agree on the law and even on when and against whom it would be enforced. I'm not sure you would agree that there's value in pointing out to the companies advocating for a law which of their actions would technically fall outside the provisions of that law. And realistically, the value is probably only cathartic.
That's just an example of the unequal enforcement of the law. In order to avoid getting your site shut down, you'd need to be friends with the rich and powerful.
So you're suggesting that if I, friend of no one, used the Xcode icon on my website and SOPA had passed Apple would go in front of a judge to have my website removed from DNS? It seems much more likely that they would either a) ignore it or b) send me a DMCA takedown. Which sounds pretty much like the two likely outcomes of this incident as well.
