This topic had me soul search a bit and I think I have it. I am definitely not for piracy or supportive of pirates. However, in the past I myself have suckled on the teat of the pirates, mostly for music in the crazy Mountain Dew fueled times of Napster, as I was a poor college student...ah hell, there are a lot of justifications, right or wrong.
However, I like examples and here is one: The United States and Saudi Arabia are "allies". We buy oil from them and leave them alone and they have truly horrific human rights that we have gone to war for less against other countries. They also support terrorism and an anti-western strain of Islam. But again, they are our allies because we have bigger fish to fry in the region and the enemy of our enemy, etc.
SO, in this debate, while I don't condone the actions of the pirates and the potential livelihoods (of regular folks, not execs and movie stars) that they endanger, I feel right now the largest threat to our freedom, democracy, and way of life is the fact that corporations have all tons of money and power and pretty much own our government. SOPA was written by the industry and I think most of these congresspeople supporting it genuinely think they are doing a good thing, they just don't know any better. So right now the enemy of my enemy is my friend and I will support the downfall of SOPA, PIPA, the RIAA, the MPAA, and all their ilk even if that means allowing the pirates to continue pirating because I truly believe they are less of a threat. I understand that the complete destruction of the entertainment industry as it now stands will endanger the jobs of a lot of ordinary, decent folk and certainly don't like that and would feel bad for each and every one of those people but at the same time I can hope that what comes afterwards will be *better* and that even those people will benefit from it.
I am nowhere nearly as naive however to think that I have any clue how that can be accomplished in a way that doesn't turn the monster hunters into even worse monsters themselves. Shit man now that I think about it I have tons of opinions on issues that I don't know how to solve - I don't know if that's right or wrong or somewhere in the middle. I just know that while I understand piracy to be a bad thing I am all retarded for Youtube let's plays, PC game mods, and spoof/satirical takes on established brands and under the wording of the current anti-piracy legislation under consideration those types of things could be considered illegal, when in my opinion they do more to PROMOTE games than harm them, even if they provide game content for "free" in the sense you can witness the game though not physically play it, or taking an IP and modifying it in some way but mostly copying the "guts" of it. I always drew the line at commercialization, that is, you can mod a game or play a scene from a movie on Youtube that you have spoofed/altered if you do so for no commercial gain. But the companies go after those folks regardless.
So yeah, this is a hugely complicated issue with many varying layers of right and wrong but right now I'm against the "industry" because they are overreaching what I would consider to be "fair" methodologies for protecting their commercial investment in these intellectual properties. I believe when they changed from allowing you to "own" a game to these byzantine licenses where they allow you to "borrow" their game (that you paid for in full) with incredible restrictions on where and when and how you can play it until such a time as they rescind that privilege that they lost any moral high ground they may have had in this argument, putting them not beneath the pirates, but in a vaguely defined grey moral equivalency.
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Topic: Hollywood Must Be Destroyed (Read 28792 times)