Justice Department Makes Defending Outdated Business Models A Priority
from the good-call dept
The attorney general unveiled a new legislative package increasing penalties for piracy and making it easier to prosecute piracy and copyright infringement. It's not totally clear at this point at who the new laws would be aimed, but given the Justice Department's propensity for blindly giving the entertainment industry what it wants, forgive us for expecting the worst. There would be a new crime called "attempting to infringe a copyright," and authorities would have new powers seize items used to produce pirated or counterfeit material. It sounds like having some files in a shared folder on your computer might be enough to land you in prison and get your PC destroyed, because some record label thinks you screwed them out of a buck. Just when it seems like the press might be seeing things from the consumers' side rather than blindly accepting the Hollywood line, the government still can't. One final question -- where are the laws to stop record labels from installing malware on people's computers?
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To whom do you think this is news?
In the 80s and 90s I knew corporate interests owned the government, but I was young and didn't care too much because it didn't seem to have much impact on me. I didn't care if Clinton got blown by interns daily because life was good. Now corporate interests are increasingly all the government seems to care about. We have oil companies increasing their profits by many Billions while we the people, make that consumers, are searching for a little vaseline to smooth out the f'ing we are taking daily.
So yeah, media companies want more $ and the government will help with a new crackdown, and we the people will slowly either bend over far enough to comfortably take the huge corporate c*ck up our backsides, or we'll finally reject their media. If Sony keeps up with their horrible DRM parade maybe, just maybe, enough people will start to fight this unsolicited and unwelcome media f*cking. But it seems more likely that most people will learn to enjoy it and do much beyond ask for 'more, more'.
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None of this will change
Fast forward to 2005, and the only thing that has improved is that you can publish this here, I can read it, and maybe enough people will take notice to make it into a political issue against the current administration.
But don't count on that. The Democrats are just as friendly to the record labels and other content companies, if not more so. They've already got the current administration backed into a corner because of the Iraq fiasco, so there's no need for the Dems to alienate their own campaign contributers and Hollywood friends by standing up for those of us who simply want to "own" music rather than licensing it. We're crazy, you see.
The only thing that will change this situation would be for the emergence of a large scale, grass-roots political movement aimed at changing the "duopoly" that runs this country. The only reason we have two parties in this country is that noone would stand for just one party, ala China. How is it we stand for two parties? We have this idea in America that there's a "right and wrong" only, so two parties fits that. Pick your side, the other side is wrong, etc. Nevermind that both sides lack a consistent, clear ideology; just look at the fact that they can't agree that whether it is 1997 or 2005, perjury is WRONG.
Two parties, folks. And they BOTH agreed on the DMCA. You want change? It's not going to happen with either the Dems or Repubs, and if you think that one is "less evil" than the other, you've already lost by playing their game.
Good luck!
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You missed the best part ...
Yes, that's right. People trading music for free is funding terrorism. Apparently terrorists buy stuff using zero-dollar bills.
In fact, crime organizations will only be able to make money off of copyright violations when the average person isn't able to do it or risk doing it. That's right, Gonzales is actually going to ENCOURAGE crime organizations. But he says he's doing the opposite.
News flash: attorney general vows to assist organized crime, fund terrorism.
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Outlaw government!
But now, everybody in the world can talk to each other almost simultaneously. Who needs one government for each major land mass anymore? We can take care of each other now by watching each other's backs, we don't need governments to babysit us anymore.
Government knows this, and the less necessary it is, the more fascist it will become, to justify its own existence. If we want to live in a free future and not a 1984 world in a few years, we've got to stop this trend now.
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