Amy,

You wrote:
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It is also important that foreign criminals not be allowed to steal the property of others without consequence. The pirating of intellectual property is not a victimless crime. Rather, it threatens the jobs and livelihoods of millions of middle class American workers and businesses. However, we must seek ways to protect people from online piracy, particularly foreign piracy, without limiting web-based innovation or a free exchange of ideas.
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This is blatant nonsense. Supporting bills like PIPA/SOPA does far more to infringe the liberties of Americans than it will ever do to prevent foreign criminals from committing copyright infringement. If you want to hold foreign criminals to account you must work with foreign governments to prosecute them in foreign countries.

The law (even the Constitution) clearly defines copyright infringement as something distinct from actual property theft. For you to say that they are the same thing is the height of intellectual dishonesty. As a lawyer and a law-maker you ought to know better than to use this sort of double-talk. Property rights in physical artifacts do not have expiration dates, copyrights and patents have expiration dates. That is an obvious difference. Further, if I steal your television, you don't have your television any more. But if I copy your book, you still have your book. In fact, I have done work to produce the copy using my own materials.

The history of copyright and patent is more a royal grant of a monopoly to certain merchants than it is a recognition of a natural right of human beings. For you to use language like "piracy" in referring to the crime of copyright infringement is to deliberately confuse the issue. Piracy is also a legal term with a very specific history, and it refers to the violent taking of vessels at sea.

And millions of American workers and businesses are threatened by copyright infringement? I doubt it. More likely, those workers and businesses are threatened by technological advances that put their questionable, monopolistic business practices at risk. Large media companies, who I assume are paying you to write this bill, have refused to adapt the way they do business to improved technology. They leave little legal avenue for those who would like to have digitial copies of movies, books, music, that we have already paid for when we bought a copy of the book at the book store, or bought on DVD or CD or VHS or LP or tape cassette. They expect consumers to pay full price (sometimes even more than full price) for the same good over again to get it in a digital form, when once the digital version has been created the cost of creating a copy of that digital version is next to nothing?

Perhaps you could write a law that made it explicitly legal to provide consumers the service of digitizing copyright works for them? Could I for instance, offer to scan books for people who owned a copy of that book? Could I make digital movie files for people have a copy of a DVD or a VHS? No. I can't. In fact, in the case of the DVD, I would be violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act by circumventing the copy protections on the DVD. If copyright owners aren't going to give consumers a reasonable way to keep up with technology, then people themselves ought to have some recourse to do things like turn a bookshelf into a set of digital files they can put on their ebook reader.

Would you like to stop piracy? Force copyright owners to recognise the doctrine of first sale with each and every form a work is produced in. If I can buy used books at a second hand shop, why can't I buy a used ebook? When I buy a brand new music CD at Target, I can sell it or give it away when I am no longer interested in listening to it. But when I buy music off of iTunes, I'm a "pirate" if I sell it again.

More suggestions: convince the media companies that they must adopt a royalties system for digital streaming services, such that consumers aren't limited to what Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, or Pandora can negotiate, but rather there is a free market in streaming digital music, movies, and providing ebooks temporarily.

By supporting PIPA/SOPA you are clearly siding with a small number of businesses and saying that their right to profit is far more important than the first amendment rights of all Americans.

Regards,
Michael.