laughingcavalier wrote:You have to ask yourself do you want to watch Hollywood movies, do you want professional journalists to cover news events around the world, do you want to read specialist magazines, do you want high quality textbooks? If you do you have got to support SOPA, PIPA
This is laughable bullshit and shows you don't know what you're talking about at all.
Firstly, let me just say I don't want to watch hollywood movies. Since when has hollywood produced anything original, anything that isn't pandering to the lowest common denominator and taking zero risks? All they do is mass-produce bullshit sequels and brainless action films for teh guys, or brainless rom-coms for teh chicks. And we're supposed to want to protect that drivel? Please.
Anyway, SOPA/PIPA will not protect the artists. The way the law is worded is so vague that it can easily be interpreted to mean that any website that contains any links to any copyrighted content, even if the links are posted by users, can be blocked in the US. SOPA/PIPA will not stop piratism, the pirates will just find ways around the blockings. What it will stop is free flow of information in the internet.
Intellectual property should be protected to some degree, but not at the expense of free speech. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, morons.
laughingcavalier wrote: Right now those works can be easily stolen and shared aross the internet without any regard or recompense to the people who created them. It will stop being economically viable to produce such work
Oh really? The music and movie industry is constantly harping on about how piratism is killing the industry, yet their profits are larger than ever. How is that possible?
And either way, if a business model cannot survive without severely limiting the rights of individuals, then that business model is flawed and needs to be changed.
Even now, there are plenty of artists and other content producers who succeed just fine, by using business models that are not from the stone age. The big corporations just don't want to adapt to an age where they no longer have control over how we entertain ourselves. They fear competition, they want a monopoly over our entertainment. So they and their bribed politicians try their best to drive the competition out.
