US lawmakers target ‘rogue websites’ with online infringement act

Soutce: Raw Story
By Agence France-Presse

Democratic and Republican members of the US Congress pledged Monday to pass legislation that would give US authorities more tools to crack down on websites engaged in piracy of movies, television shows and music and the sale of counterfeit goods.

Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would introduce a new version "soon" of a bill designed to combat so-called "rogue websites."

A previous bill co-sponsored by Leahy, called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee by a 19-0 vote in November, but never made it to the Senate floor.

Read More at:http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/05/us-lawmakers-target-rogue-websites-with-online-infringement-act/

a HUGE problem awaits in the Pacific Ocean threatening people, animals, seafood, and the health of this planet. Nice to see they have their priorities so worked out...........

Sometimes you have to confront an emergency not with the safety infrastructure you want, but with the safety infrastructure that is in place. It will take months til the administration shifts priorities and spends more on monitoring.

I have NO faith in elected officials any more...........

Remember, it's REGULATORY professionals, not elected or appointed officials, among several agencies that must actually do the work that will protect us.

If you shrink the government so that you can drown it in a bathtub, then almost by definition it will drown in the first tsunami it faces.

Elected officials pass the laws that the regulatory professionals have to work with and appointed people direct the regulatory professionals.

The legal charters under which we worked remained stable (16 years of having a republican governor) at that point). The administrative rules did not stay stable. Depending on who was appointed to lead, the Director could push pet projects...when I was with DOH there was a new director who had an interest in minority communities in the southern neighborhoods of Madison. More programs had outreach there in that time, but in general efforts were pretty much the same across the districts of the state.

The staff who did the day to day work were surprisingly resilient to change. They believed in their missions to serve community health and went about that work with little actual interference from the political appointments (which is not to say political appointments didn't meddle at all). Much of the work delivering services I was working with (TB control, immunizations) was funded by grants from the Federal gov't, so changes in funding at that level had greater impact than changes in state and much much greater impact than local politics.