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While Drafting SOPA, the U.S. House Harbors BitTorrent
- atomical 15y agoI love how the article ends, 'Although the above is interesting, as the House is the place where lawmakers are currently trying to push though SOPA, this revelation might actually help their cause. If even people at the House are “stealing” content, we really need SOPA to counter it, they may say The question is though, whether SOPA will be able to break the habits of millions of Americans, as there will always be alternatives available. And even if it manages to put a dent in the current piracy rates, is that really worth it considering the potential damage SOPA can do to the open Internet and legal businesses?' Their article is link bait with one arguably substantive paragraph at the end.
- gasull 15y agoYes, but interesting anyway. The title of the article should be "What the US House bittorrents the most"
- atomical 15y agoWhich is actually even more misleading. How about, "Staffers pirate content in US House."
- nextparadigms 15y agoI don't remember exactly, but I think they were calling for the House to be exempt from SOPA at the hearing.
- wycats 15y agoUnless the idea is that house.gov would be hosting bittorrent trackers, this doesn't really have anything to do with this story.
- neutronicus 15y agoI'm ignorant of how YouHaveDownloaded.com works. Does it have any way to weed out dummy IP addresses inserted by trackers? Claiming to have peers in the House seems like exactly the sort of cheeky thing the TPB trackers would do.
- SurenTer 15y agoYes, it has. YouHaveDownloaded performs random check of obtained IPs - to make sure they actually up/download.
- obtu 15y agoNot really, there were martian addresses in there last time I looked.
- Natsu 15y agoWhile I would be very suspicious of how accurate any one accusation is, especially if they were trying it in court, I do think that some of the materials look very much like things that Congressional staffers would be interested in. So if I assume it's only 50% accurate or whatever, I can certainly still believe that there's filesharing going on over there.
- bediger 15y agoThey don't practice what they preach, because they're not the kind of person they're preaching to.
- a_a_r_o_n 15y agoTo borrow a phrase, "When the Congress does it, that means that it is not illegal." Nixon/David Frost interview, 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvyDn1TPr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvyDn1TPr8