it's like some kind of cyber hangover

[seperis]

When I opened iTunes this morning, I was a little surprised to find myself flinching when I started going to the Store to stare hopefully at The Fray. I mean, I get precisely why this is bothering me, and where it's coming from, but it just hit me all at once that SOPA was partially funded by every song I legally buy, every movie I legally buy, every show I legally buy. It's one thing to in general know that this happens with all purchases, but it's also the fact that if I want this show/song/program legally, my only options is to pay people to hold me in contempt for my purchase and then use it to bribe politicians to take away my rights to use the product (and um, the entire internet).

I mean, yes, it's self-evident, don't get me wrong, but--there really isn't an alternative to the entertainment industry monopoly, is there? I can't buy anything that won't be paying for the giant legal stick to beat me with later. And when worse comes, terrifyingly, I will have funded it.

And my answer still stands.

If I had to choose between music and Wikipedia, music and the internet, music and the infinite breadth of human imagination and innovation that is pretty much what the internet is all about; that's not even a choice. That's what I would call breathing.

Okay, obviously, I have not had my recommended dose of watching things blow up. It may be a Die Hard night again.

Comments

[seperis]

*winces* Counterfeit goods, yeah. I'm not nearly as informed on the problem, other than the most superficial overview of it, but yeah, I can definitely see the arguments on those being different.

[cyprinella]

Yeah. And I totally get where they're coming from on that, especially when there's only so much you can do about someone scraping your site and putting everything up on www.cheapbrandname.russianmalware.com and all the consumer reads is cheapbrandname. It's just the way they decided to handle it was, um, bad. It doesn't help that the main GR person who was dealing with lobbying for the bill is a guy who can hardly work his own computer let alone understand how the internet functions. So he's sitting there raging that Wikipedia is telling lies about how the law would function and I'm like "Dude, you can't even make Excel function."