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"What I'm saying is that any nation that is significantly affected by the actions of a computer company is probably advance enough to take care of their own people."

"In fact, one could just as easily argue that he is helping those people by his recent philanthropy."

"It is exactly that attitude that has allowed the status quo to remain largely unchanged, despite the fact that humanity has had the resources and technical knowhow to end all poverty since about the 17th century."

"I seriously doubt anyone's life was "destroyed""

"What would you have preferred that he done, played completely nice and never succeed in the business world, give every penny he made to some poor nation (in which case why aren't you doing the same), or what?"

You are talking out of your ass, corporate whore. You are so eager to be ass-rammed by corporations that you actually belive what you are writing.

If everything was this simple, if the people always were in power, there wouldn't be any dictators in the world.

"The law recognizes the corporation in the same light as the individual - in some ways even more so."

"I think it is an inherent right of persons in any government to petition the government with regard to their grievances."

"If the government funds all movies, music, and entertainment.. isn't that the start of a pretty effective propaganda machine?"

I don't think removing corporate rights and restoring power to the actual people would be a bad thing. And I'd rather see propaganda representing the people, rather than corporate interests.

"and the site is seriously expecting these people to cough up cash to fight a court case against the MPAA?"

People aren't necessarily opposed to paying for things. Now, some of the people downloading movies over BT will probably never pay, as long as they can get away with it. But others may be downloading movies because they are opposed to the way the MPAA behaves, or because they have to wait for ages until they get to watch the movie, and they want it right away, or they have bought the DVD, but it was region encoded, and couldn't be played on their player, and so on.

These "pirates" are not a group of homogenous people. The reasons for downloading movies for free and the willingness to pay for something worthwile differs from person to person.

You should also realize that this case does not appear to be only about this particular torrent site, but it could be an important case, since they are challenging the evil and customer/individuality hostile DMCA.

I can imagine that some of the most hardcore "pirates" will gladly pay to see the evil fuckers (excuse my French) who keep lobbying to remove individual rights getting their asses handed to them in court. I know I would be thrilled if the MPAA went straight to Hell. These organizations are nothing more than corporate propaganda machines working to make corporations more powerful, and remove the rights of individual human beings. They want to reduce you and I to mindles drones whose only purpose is to strenthen the corporations. I want to reduce them to rubble.

DMCA, for example? This is a serious problem. This is yet another step towards even more corporate control. We are worth nothing to them as individuals. Only as good sheep are we worth anything. We only exist to serve corporations. Or that's the way they'd like it to be anyway.

Recommended reading: Gangs of America - a historical view on corporations and their rise to power.

In this corporate world, there is very little economic 'freedom' of the sort that the U.S. founding fathers worked so hard to provide. They were aware of the effect corporations could have on those freedoms; corporate formation was severely limited. The era of the self-employed businessman is pretty much over. It's not that we have lost the 'will for freedom' - ask the many mom-and-pop grocers that the corps have put out of business - it's that small, entrepreneurial businesses simply can't survive the competition with corporations. Walmart alone has devastated the American heartland, crushing many, many formerly prosperous small-town main streets. All the 'will to freedom' in the world can't fight significantly lower prices from a corporate organization.

Gangs of America : The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy

You can download a PDF of the book and there are also several chapters online in HTML.