U.S. Joins Hollywood in War on Piracy

Section_Ei8ht writes to mention a Washington Post article about a new joint initiative between the U.S. government and the entertainment industry. The government will now be aiding efforts abroad to stop copyright infringement. They cite the recent Pirate Bay fiasco, as well as the problems Russia is having with the WTO as a result of their thriving IP black market. From the article: "The intellectual property industry and law enforcement officials estimate U.S. companies lose as much as $250 billion per year to Internet pirates, who swap digital copies of 'The DaVinci Code,' Chamillionaire's new album and the latest Grand Theft Auto video game for free."

Comments

I love contributor links...

[drinkypoo]

...such a this one. I used it to send a letter to the author of the linked article. This letter is enclosed below. If it contains factual errors, let me know; I may have listened to the wrong slashbots.

In "U.S. Joins Industry in Piracy War" you seem to allude to the shutdown of The Pirate Bay early on when you say mention an "illegal file-sharing Web site" in Sweden. Numerous Swedes have been working to set people straight on this - The website "The Pirate Bay" was in no way illegal under Swedish law because it does not itself contain any copyrighted materials, only links to the same. Your assertion that their site is illegal is libelous at best, since Swedish law does not prohibit such a site. In fact, their law only prohibits the exchange of copyrighted material - having it unshared on your hard disk is not a crime.

Copyright law in the US was intended to protect our cultural heritage, not to provide profit to copyright holders in perpetuity. It is now little more than a shield that megacorporations can hide behind so that they have no need to innovate and bring us something NEW. The two acts which extended copyright were far from being in the interest of the American people.

The seizure of TPB's servers illustrates that fascism is alive and well, and spreading throughout the world. The police in fact seized numerous servers that did not even belong to TPB as an apparent scare tactic to bring ISPs in line with their wishes, even though they were not backed up by law - if you harbor those who are practicing their legal rights, you may in fact lose business because we will interfere with it, deliberately and without cause.

By referring to TPB's actions as illegal, you are helping to perpetuate a fraud against the entire planet.

Hopefully I was correct about all this, but the claims I have made above were made in many long-standing high-score comments in the last discussion about this subject, and not refuted, so hopefully peer review will have made me sound like I know what I'm talking about.

A corollary quote...

[QRDeNameland]

Eventually it was discovered
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same

This was
Bad News
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings

Mankind must be made more uniformly
If
The Future
Was going to work

Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas
Same-ness was unenforcable

It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of
Total Criminalization

Based on the principle that
If we were All crooks
We could at least be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of
The Law

Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
Real Crime
So new laws were manufactored
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President
The most excalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions

Total Criminalization
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,

So, of course, they had to be
Tricked Into It ...
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal.

--Frank Zappa (from the booklet of Joe's Garage, Acts II & III - 1979)

Re:Stupidity in action

[QRDeNameland]

It's pretty stupid to claim that if we had a war on porn, then 70% of the population would be criminals. If 70% of the population supported porn in a democracy that criminalized porn, then they would be a shining example of stupidity in action.

Think about alcohol Prohibition. Before and after Prohibition, a majority of adult Americans drank alcohol at least occasionally. (Perhaps even during it, though we'll never know.) Yet the idea was popular enough to get passed via constitutional amendment, requiring the approval of two thirds of both houses of Congress AND all the state legislatures. Not that it wasn't stupid, it was *so* stupid that 13 years later it became the only amendment ever repealed.

Never underestimate the ability of the American electorate to be precisely that stupid.