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Posted on Techdirt - 3 December 2011 @ 12:00pm

Just John's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

from the a-freetard-american-in-taiwan dept

So, here we are again at week's end, and there are more posts to review.

I was slightly surprised when asked to write the reviews, since I tend to be more “freetard” than anything. Not by choice, unless you call my choice to live in a country other than the US a choice. Instead, as some may know, I am an American living in Taiwan, and because of the banking rules here, online purchases and international purchases are not an option for me. Of course, this also means that I have some personal perspective when Taiwan makes fun of your current politics. That is when you know you've hit the bottom.

What does this mean? I must often times turn to illegal downloads of pirated materials for my entertainment, or suffer from endless bad shows in Chinese and very few options.

In the digital age though, this makes no sense. It is not as if you have to ship the package to Taiwan. It's a digital good, and I can just go to www.yourproductdownload.com. After all, even though I cannot use my card online here, I still have other means of ordering online and paying for it. So, what is the content industries excuse? Guess this shows more examples of how the content industry is hurting themselves.

I read this blog to keep up with the changes occurring in our world, as well as other blogs, because my job is part of the technical community, so impacts on that community impact me. However, as an international, I have also found the US government’s approach to the rest of the world more than slightly disturbing.

They choose to try to enact a world changing law, SOPA/PIPA, and exert their authority over the internet, when they are not the world government and have no right to do so. We see more and more that the US government is trying to find ways to detain foreign citizens, based on US laws. How does this make sense? Why am I paying taxes (And yes, I file taxes every year), to pay my government to go muck up other peoples countries? Maybe they should worry about fixing the problems at home first?

The worst part about it is, as we finally found out, the government isn’t doing this for the people, but instead is just pushing forward what they are told to like good little bought officials.

What is even worse is that these industries are making money, and have been shown how technology helps them over and over and over again.

On top of this, they fail to see how it can be abused, even though we already have an example here, here, and here. These are not just hypotheticals (well, the first is, but that is because it is the most outrageous); they happened. Want that company to shut down the consumer reviews because someone told you about bad service? How will you separate the good from the bad?

The one bright note, at least they are paying some attention and finally starting to admit the public does not like this. Maybe it is just an international trade issue and needs some trade agreements, not some internet breaking laws. After all, it’s not like they will stop it anyways.

And most of all, please, please stop throwing in child porn references into arguments about, well, anything except child porn. Maybe Godwin’s laws need to go beyond Hitler references…

Anyways, I will get off my SOPA box and see you in the funny papers.

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