I threw away my tv a few years ago, now i get my news on the net, and my entertainment on vimeo, youtube, etc…

And if i feel like watching a movie, theres a ton of theaters with indie movies to pick from.

I’m all in for criminalizing your backup copies of britney spears.

Bring on the ‘zines, home videos and animations, et. al. The DIY stuff has always been the best. We’d paid too high a cultural price for the massification of ever damn decent medium, for decades.

Yes, please, please: kill mass consumerism. Let a hundred thousand voices emerge!

And I’m an artist, one of those people that copyright apparently ‘helps’

hopefully, more and more content creators will begin to make use of the creative commons, and hopefully, content consumers will begin to see the difference and avoid all works that have the ‘all rights reserved’ stamp on it.

My ISP (cablevision) is giving me a Domain-Not-Found error.

Or bring it all the way. They can go to jail or get the death penalty as well. Problem is figuring out what jail is (jailing the CEO? Ceasing all operations for the sentence period?)

they’ll likely change the laws to criminalize ‘overuse’ of encryption for personal use, or at least set the precedent that someone using it must be trying to hide something (I think they already do this, claiming people are trying to hide something heinous, like child pornography)

Encryption + zombie computers sending out fake requests for copyrighted material should keep them on their toes for quite a while. If the zombie computers can be made to appear like they belong to prominent politicians, you would extra bonus points. :)

Where’s the direct action increasing the use of strong encryption and open spectrum?

We seriously need to have a federal bill making it illegal for a corporate entity to be considered a person.

That’s not really the issue here. The subject at hand is the government-business partnership, perhaps best modeled according to Public Choice Theory.

Public Choice theory is often used to explain how political decision-making results in outcomes that conflict with the preferences of the general public. For example, many special interest and pork barrel projects are not the desire of the overall democracy. However, it makes sense for politicians to support these projects. It may make them feel powerful and important. It can also benefit them financially by opening the door to future wealth as lobbyists. The project may be of interest to the politician’s local constituency, increasing district votes or campaign contributions. The politician pays little or no cost to gain these benefits, as he is spending public money. Special-interest lobbyists are also behaving rationally. They can gain government favors worth millions or billions for relatively small investments. They face a risk of losing out to their competitors if they don’t seek these favors. The taxpayer is also behaving rationally. The cost of defeating any one government give-away is very high, while the benefits to the individual taxpayer are very small. Each citizen pays only a few pennies or a few dollars for any given government favor, while the costs of ending that favor would be many times higher. Everyone involved has rational incentives to do exactly what they’re doing, even though the desire of the general constituency is opposite.

Sonny Bono was fighting for ‘our’ way of life!

We also need to make people aware that IP law has tremendous human rights consequences. Whether it is providing tools to keep information flowing across borders (particularly relevant given the issues in Iran), or access to life saving drugs in poor nations hardest hit by the AIDs pandemic, we need to make this an issue relevant to everyone.

I don’t think it is rhetorical excess to say the Pirate Parties can be, if they take on that role, the new abolitionists.