SOPA

[Treewyrm]

Nu-uh. I don't favor idealism and don't hold ivory tower acolytes in high regard either.

Internet provides something else: it's a self-publishing platform where you can publish your work and/or use varying payment methods and schemes, effectively you're directly interacting with your customers, your fan base, providing an opportunity to build a community around your works and products. Be that digital distribution where you entirely bypass brick and mortar retail chain, or physical distribution through mail order. Many postal services are reporting tremendous increase in parcel shipping, so much some of them are having hard time adapting to the volumes being sent all across the globe, and they are directly attributing this increase to the rise of Internet-based merchandise platforms and I'm not even counting eBay. So I think that's what scares off big media industry - they've been the middle-man between creators and consumers for decades and they're treating their position as if they're entitled to it, they are protecting that position, not the artists. Internet, as a whole, is a foe to them, because in Internet they're in same position as anyone else really and don't have that much of advantage they have in classic retail distribution chain where they practically control almost every aspect, from prices to regional differences, marketing and promotion. So they don't want to play on same terms as others do, they want exclusive rights and laws for themselves, and this will provide them exactly that, it'll give them significant advantage and they'll be held above the law, it's guilty until proven innocent. They wouldn't need court order at all to push you out, but you'll need to get through the court to prove your innocence, and by that time your business will be damaged significantly as not only DNS block will be put on you but also your payment accounts will be frozen too. There is no competition between the big media that would be beneficial to customers, they're long been playing along, effectively establishing monopoly. I believe the roots for those insane bills are within these reasons, perceiving alternate solutions as a threat to their business, evidenced by their actions, such as attempting to outlaw creative commons. Piracy is mostly an instrument, it's largely a scapegoat, just like terrorism was used effectively to push other laws. In the end it's about gaining unprecedented control, securing and maintaining market domination by trampling over the freedoms and innovations as they're slowly taken away one by one, be that in the name of state security or protecting intellectual property as both are not the ends and purpose but means to artificially maintain the state. I guess it's where money is speech, corporations are people and governments are small, subsidized and occupied by lobbyists, got to ask: are their elected representatives also corporate employees on a payroll and campaign sponsorship? Pretty much sounds like a legalized bribery to me.