Facebook
Fark
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012 | 2 a.m.
As the Consumer Electronics Show runs this week in Las Vegas, inventive small businesses, pioneering startup enterprises and major tech companies are showcasing their most impressive new technologies and innovations. When they are successful, these innovations mean jobs for working people and middle-class families here in Nevada and across the country.
Those jobs are jeopardized, though, because these inventive ideas and products are under constant threat from offshore websites that are stealing and reproducing their patented and copyrighted products. That’s why the Nevada State AFL-CIO is supporting two bills before Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT-IP) in the Senate. These bills would protect the families working in thousands of jobs in Nevada that rely on intellectual property protection to keep their businesses running.
When foreign websites illegally sell counterfeited intellectual property, they are taking jobs, income and benefits from American workers. In fact, according to a study cited by the National Crime Prevention Council, counterfeit products and stolen intellectual property may cost up to 750,000 jobs each year and $250 billion in lost revenue across all sectors of the economy. The motion picture industry alone employs nearly 7,900 people in Nevada — not just actors, but stage employees, technicians, musicians, writers and many other middle-class workers. And the revenues generated from the film industry’s production in Nevada total more than $90 million each year and $1.2 billion since 2000. Online piracy put this all at risk.
While the entertainment industry is an important employer in Nevada and many members of our unions have jobs in the industry, threats to copyright infringement also extend far beyond film and music. Nevada businesses developing software and creative manufacturing technologies are also supporting SOPA and PROTECT-IP to protect their innovations from being stolen and distributed on the Internet. The engineering firm Bechtel Nevada, one of Southern Nevada’s largest nongaming employers with 3,000 employees, and Reno-based gaming developer International Game Technology, employing 2,500 in Reno and 600 in Las Vegas, both support these solutions to protect their intellectual property and the vitality of their businesses.
To protect Nevada workers and Nevada businesses, SOPA and PROTECT-IP would give the Justice Department new tools to police foreign-owned and operated websites that illegally share copyrighted material by requiring companies based here in the U.S. to take action to prevent access to them. And, contrary to baseless attacks you may have heard, these bills are narrowly focused to target only websites whose sole purpose is to provide or direct browsers to stolen content from the industries that are critical to our economy.
In fact, this is such a critically important economic issue that both bills have support from a wide variety of businesses and organizations here in Nevada. Gov. Brian Sandoval and Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto also support it because they understand the need to protect job creators in Nevada. The bottom line is that if we are to protect American workers and ensure that they continue to benefit from the jobs that American innovation creates, we must protect our intellectual property from foreign piracy.
We applaud Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s actions to make sure this bill is addressed this Congress. At a time when Nevada’s unemployment leads the nation, we can’t afford to send additional jobs out of Nevada.
Danny L. Thompson is executive secretary treasurer of the Nevada State AFL-CIO, representing 125 affiliates and 225,000 members.
Your view on "effective tools" is curious. One could argue that explosives are "effective tools" for ant control, but the side effects are a bit extreme. Similarly, SOPA and PIPA are dangerous, inaccurate tools that provide more collateral damage than solutions. If you support these acts, you are agreeing that it's ok for someone who doesn't like, for example, the LV Sun, to claim copyright infringement and have you removed from the web. Proof isn't required, just a "good faith" belief. Enjoy your legal battles for the next few years trying to get your business back online.
Unfortunately, our best ideas and newest products are supposedly and routinely sent to other countries in Diplomatic pouches. There is no way to stop that short of not marketing the programming, PC chips and other electronic products.
What we need is a bill to stop the obscene overcharging of physical media, not bills that are blatent protectionism of old technologies with the goal of eliminating the competition by limiting the innovations in on-line digital technology.
Is this the new American way? To band together to ban the competition.
In many ways the SOPA and PIPA move the Internet further toward a world of guilty until proven innocent that started with the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Under the DMCA large corporations can claim that you violate their copyright and have an ISP pull your content down. It is then up to you to prove that it does not in order to get it reinstated. These bills serve in many ways to expand that power and shift more control over the Internet to large corporations and government. But that seems to be our constant direction and one we are sold again and again as being necessary for our safety and prosperity.
Thank you, Danny, for a very informative article. Nevada is not the only State where movies mean work for craftsmen and shop clerks on Main Street.
The MegaUpLoad Bust proves we already have copyright protection. SOPA and PIPA will build private data bases of personal profiles - in the name of copyright protection - that will be used to characterize people for everything from insurance to employment.
The data mining allowed by SOPA and PIPA by private entities (not Government) will track not only Vertical downloads from suspected sites, but Horizontal downloads, material from person to person. In doing so, the person's personal data stream will be logged, stored and kept for PROOF later on when they are sent a bill for $10,000 for 'copyright infringement'.
As proof, read the bills: SOPA and PIPA have no security provisions for the data to be collected. A person's internet profile can be sold.
SOPA and PIPA are RIGHTHAVEN on a National scale, and ONLY the BEGINNING. Once the Master Plan for Data Mining is passed, a large number of 'add-ons' as 'amendments' to each bill will be passed in virtual secrecy.
The verdict will be 'Guilty Until Proven Innocent' and will cost innocent people tens of thousands of dollars to keep their retirement savings and home equity from being emptied into 'Infringement Task Forces'.
The objective of "Privatized Pensions" is to put a person's retirement in VULNERABLE positions, so that they can easily be emptied into the Vulture Infringement Enforcer's funds. SOPA and PIPA will be the excuses to attack and drain those Pensions.
SOPA and PIPA are the greatest threat to privacy of the individual and their financial security in retirement. Nasty things they are.
And the people who say "That's Not True" will be no where to be found for the defense when it happens.