Posted on 01/10/2012 2:44:12 PM PST by Smogger
It is no secret that the MPAA and other pro-copyright groups lobby politicians and law enforcers, but when a column by a prominent Attorney General appears to be written directly by the entertainment industries something is horribly wrong.
A few days ago Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff wrote an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune. In the column the Attorney General stresses how important it is for Congress to pass the SOPA and PIPA bills. The MPAA is delighted with the support and praised it in a blog post yesterday.
“Shurtleff effectively hammers the point that Google, Yahoo and others have spent millions trying to distort – that states which allow rogue websites to operate unfettered will experience massive revenue reduction and job loss,” the MPAA writes.
The Attorney General’s statements do indeed bolster what the MPAA and other pro-copyright groups have said all along. By itself this is not unusual, but when we examined the article in more detail we began to notice that many of the sentences that are passed off as Shurtleff’s work actually look very familiar.
Could it be that the column was partly written by the MPAA?
We say yes. To back up this claim we will highlight a few sentences from the Attorney General’s article, and compare them with those previously delivered by the MPAA and affiliated pro-copyright groups.
The first sentence that caught our attention is: “It will take a strong, sustained effort to stop Internet thieves and profiteers.”
Strong words, but also familiar ones. In fact, former MPAA President Bob Pisano uttered exactly the same words in 2010 when he congratulated the Senate Judiciary Committee with unanimously approving the COICA bill, the predecessor to SOPA and PIPA.
(Excerpt) Read more at torrentfreak.com ...
Remember folks, this kind of legislation could be used to shut down websites like Free Republic.
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