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GoDaddy Backs SOPA
redletterdave writes "Website hosting company GoDaddy has officially voiced its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) Bill in 2012, which is designed to thwart movie and music piracy on the Internet by empowering copyright holders to effectively shut down websites or online services found with infringing material. If passed, the U.S. government could blacklist any website it deems in violation of copyright, which could range from a few posts in a Web forum to a few links sent in an e-mail. GoDaddy supports SOPA for 'protecting the intellectual property of hard-working Americans, U.S. business and the American public from the harm that necessarily flows from the purchase of counterfeit products.' Yet, of the 142 companies that support the SOPA bill, GoDaddy is the only Internet company on the list."
Counterfeit Cosmetics. The stuff that comes from China is not only bears fraudulent trademarks, but if you thought tainted baby formula and petfood was trouble, just wait till someone dies from tainted cosmetics.
Anyway, yes based on what eBay takes down under VeRO, the cosmetics industry (namely MAC ) tends to err on the side of "probably counterfeit" even re-imports.
I also need to mention that a lot of stuff that is taken down under DMCA's in the cosmetic and pharmacutical industry is not always counterfeit, but rather it's parallel imports. eg Company A owns the right to Trademark B in country C, but in Country Z, Company A doesn't own the rights to Trademark B, or Company A markets it under Trademark Y, or something. Case in point the iPhone trademark in the US and Canada, the iPhone trademark was owned by different companies in Canada and the US, but Apple was still using it to sell the iPhone.
But that's generally the problem with stuff that comes from China, you don't know if it's actually Counterfeit as in FAKE, or counterfeit as in it just violates a trademark right but otherwise is the exact same product. Here's an example, a lot of companies, like JCP sell stuff under their house brand, but it's made in China. Those exact same Chinese companies then throw a site up on Taobao and sell the exact same item, using JCP's stock photo's. Now 50% chance you'll get the item as displayed, the other 50% of the time you get "factory seconds" or in other words, counterfeits.
I'm speaking purely from experience with dealing with China. Trust me when I say that SOPA goes beyond simply the MPAA's agenda. The companies already have the laws they need under the DMCA, they do not need any more power. What they do need is a bigger hammer for dealing with foreign sites that are neither hosted nor have any financial ties to the US. This is what SOPA tries to do but goes about it in the most incompetent manner they could imagine.
If it was stripped down to deal only with suspending financial transactions (ads and credit card payments) I'm sure most of the software/media pirates could live with it, along with most of the tech sites (well maybe not the filelocker sites) as this hurts the people making money off of piracy. It's much harder to get a throw-away merchant account than it is for the people buying throw-away prepaid cards. But the systematic abuse of the DMCA (see UMG and also Public Domain content on Youtube) to prevent people from making money, hurting competitors (see parallel imports above) means that the SOPA is simply bad law that would be abused in the same manner by the same people.
It is in the worlds best interest that copyright be free-market, that means no regulations, that means no anti-piracy regulations as well. Counterfeits are already covered by consumer safety laws, and even trademark laws. The companies that want these draconian laws just want the regulations so that it's cheaper for them to censor the internet.
Megaupload has legitimate purposes (much more than the pirate bay) but the unfortunate thing is, pirates have been getting around laws and terms of service contracts for far longer than many of you people have been alive. What was Jobs and Woz's first product? The bluebox for making free phone calls. This is how many people get started inventing... guns don't kill people, people kill people. Proof of concept the bluebox yes defrauds the phone company of potential money. But when you sell the box, you aren't providing them with this info, and you as the seller are not marketing it as "defraud the phone company" you are marketing as "free phone calls, I don't know why."
That's how Napster, Kazaa, and Bittorrent all started out as well. The push for better file sharing techniques, it just so happened that piracy is the easiest way to demonstrate a how cheap it really is to transfer information over the internet if everyone has to put their bandwidth in. The MPAA still equate piracy with people who have a million dollars in replication equipment, who