"I've been saying this for 2 decades: if people keep violating copyrights, it will come back and bite you. SOPA doesn't surprise me -- that it has taken this long does. Sure, "our" community is now mighty upset about SOPA, but I seldomly hear anything constructive from the same community to prevent piracy. In fact, the community is full of people with hundreds of gigabytes of illegally downloaded music and movies. Fess up, how many of you have never downloaded a pirated copy of a movie, a piece of music, a book, or something else that should have been paid for?"

Hear, hear!

It's one thing for people with some technical savvy who know where to look to pirate creative works. That kind of pirating (From Napster to Pirate Bay) while hurting copyright owners and dependent industries is not as bad as Google, twitter, facebook etc allowing their users to post and link to copyrighted materials without permission. That is what has created the urgency among the creative industry and helped lead to several waves of layoffs of over the last 10-15 years. (There are other factors but denying piracy has cost people their jobs is silly.)

The shell game Google played by making the phrase "Data wants to be free." changing 'Property' to 'Data' was smart and effective in getting the online sheeple to pass it along without further examination.


"...the adversities born of well-placed thoughts should be considered mercies rather than misfortunes." — Don Quixote

In reply to Re^4: PM joins the SOPA Blackout? by luis.roca
in thread PM joins the SOPA Blackout? by cavac

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