Operation Payback Shuts Down IFPI Site

newtley writes "Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music's main IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) website is down. Not coincidentally, there's an Operation Payback post addressing the Pirate Bay crew's lost sentencing appeal: 'Dear IFPI, MAFIAA and other parasites, The recent verdict in the Swedish Appeal Court (ThePirateBay spectrial) provoked this statement from Operation: Payback. We emphasize our statement with a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack aimed at the IFPI's website.'"

Comments

Re:Rebels leading the charge! Freedom fighters uni

[QuoteMstr]

Your class-baiting, "the pie can never grow, so the only way for anyone to enter the middle class is to take money from somebody else" clap-trap is embarassingly juvenile.

The pie is growing, but the wealthy are taking the vast majority of the increase:

In recent years, the statistics regarding income disparity in America have been startling. After-tax annual income for the bottom fifth of American households inched up just 6 percent form 1979 to 2005, according to the Congressional Budget Office. During that time, income for the middle fifth of households grew by a modest 21 percent, with much of that gain caused by women in many households working more hours. Over that same period, income for the top fifth of households jumped by an impressive 80 percent, while income for the top 1 percent more than tripled, soaring by 228 percent.

The wealth disparity itself is a problem, but worse is the corrosive effect this wealth has on our political structure: those with money and influence are increasingly able to purchase government policies that further increase their share of the pie even at the expense of the total size of the pie. It's a positive feedback loop: more wealth leads to more power, and more power leads to greater wealth. This feedback is why I'm so dour about our prospects: the cycle seems impossible to break.

The little things we agitate about today: censorship, abuse of copyright, overzealous airport security, our foreign wars, the loss of our manufacturing jobs, are all caused by the increasing ability of the wealthy to pervert government to work in their favor. When power is concentrated in a few hands, the result is inevitably selfish exercise of that power and poor outcomes.