Ao no Exorcist
- Joined
- Jan 4, 2010
- Messages
- 438
Don't be naive. This isn't some dystopian government plot to control the minds of the sheeple, it's simple business and asset protection of the variety that's been around since people were trading in animal skins. The only thing these companies want total control of is their products, which they're losing when these products are released freely to venues as expansive and impossible to regulate as the internet and stolen by entertainment freeloaders.
Pirates often rationalize and mitigate the true impact of their actions with the excuse that entertainment companies are in possession of often astronomical sums of money and that their business isn't as affected by piracy as they like to claim. But we're talking cumulative annual losses of hundreds of millions of dollars caused by the uploading of movies, music and other media onto the web, which is proportionally monumental to these companies. And while one user illegally obtaining one file here and there won't be the downfall of Miramax or Interscope, what pirates are often deliberately oblivious to is the fact that they're just one more thief among legions of others, and that the parasitism of this collective is where the real damage is dealt.
If we continue to justify our (illegal) actions to ourselves and pretend that it's only fair and that we're entitled to all the free entertainment we want, what's eventually going to happen is that these companies are going to scale back on production, due either to lack of funds or as a punitive measure to combat theft, and we're ultimately going to be deprived of things that might otherwise have been made for our enjoyment. In other words, the worse piracy gets, the less available and lower-quality entertainment will become.
Bills like CISPA aren't being written because corporations are tyrannical and want to hoarde more and more properties for themselves. They're not trying to subvert or exploit consumers, in most cases; the consumer is where their profits come from. These bills are being formulated because of our own greed and entitlement. What is essentially taking place is no different from shoplifting or holding up a bank and then complaining that it's unconstitutional to be arrested for it. It's the next step that companies are willing to take to defend their rightful property and it's going to continue escalating until either we acknowledge that piracy is an illicit activity and a rampant problem and take steps to reduce it to a sustainable level, or we strangle more and more of our own rights away from ourselves by not complying with this country's laws.
You're wrong