Really the scary part is this. No one arrested today are/were US citizens

"Kim Dotcom, aka Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, 37, a resident of both Hong Kong and New Zealand. Dotcom founded Megaupload Limited and is the director and sole shareholder of Vestor Limited, which has been used to hold his ownership interests in the Mega-affiliated sites.

Finn Batato, 38, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the chief marketing officer;

Julius Bencko, 35, a citizen and resident of Slovakia, who is the graphic designer;

Sven Echternach, 39, a citizen and resident of Germany, who is the head of business development;

Mathias Ortmann, 40, a citizen of Germany and resident of both Germany and Hong Kong, who is the chief technical officer, co-founder and director;

Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and resident of both Turkey and Estonia, who is a software programmer and head of the development software division;

Bram van der Kolk, aka Bramos, 29, a Dutch citizen and resident of both the Netherlands and New Zealand, who oversees programming and the underlying network structure for the Mega conspiracy websites.

Dotcom, Batato, Ortmann and van der Kolk were arrested today in Auckland, New Zealand, by New Zealand authorities, who executed provisional arrest warrants requested by the United States. Bencko, Echternach and Nomm remain at large."

_________________
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.-Khalil Gibran

thats the world police at work

also.. don't musicians make more doing live concerts than digital/record sales?


light bulb! ! ! why don't the media companies hire people to filter and help monitor sites hosting pirated material? it would reduce piracy, increase sales, provide jobs and in the end stimulate the world economy! then people can afford to buy the crap

_________________

Most of the "mainstream" sites and programs used for piracy are in fact owned by CNET. They essentially lure people into that trap and then sue them for obscene amounts of money. What's interesting about that, though, is that since CNET HOSTS the files and enables people to download them, they are in fact the ones liable.

Also, if music is available for free, more people hear and it and as aresult go to a show, buy merch, etc.. Bands make next to nothing from record sales, so piracy is really only a good thing.

_________________
Favorite bands:

Melvins
The Jesus Lizard
Cows
Big Business
R***man
Minutemen
Flight
Minor Threat
Big Black
Shellac
Karp
Scratch Acid
Wipers
Pixies

They know without a doubt the bill will not put a dent in piracy. The kind of people who pirate and run piracy services are far too smart to be brought to heel by mere legislation and have continued to elude the best efforts of the US and it's lackeys. SOPA/PIPA exists for one reason, to protect an aging and crooked business model, dominated by large corporations who are slowly but surely being eroded by people like you and me.

These corporations want to stifle the internet because the internet is the biggest threat to their dominance that has ever existed. For decades, through control of radio stations and television channels, corporations have made bank, but now, all the money in the world can't save them from guys in their bedrooms and home-made studios creating content that is more relevant to the current generation. The variety the big media corporations refused to provide because it "wasn't profitable", is now being provided by hundreds of thousands of amateur, semi-pro and professional independent creators and directors and we're all competing for the most important currency of all, time. The time you spend watching our material is time you don't spend watching theirs. It's money directly out of their pocket that they could have been earning before the internet came along and that's the hilarious thing about this whole deal.

Piracy is not what's killing their profits, completely legitimate competition from the internet is. They use the cause of "fighting piracy" as a trojan horse to force through bought and paid for legislation to kill independent content creation for good because they can see the end is nigh for their aging and increasingly irrelevant business model. They know they cannot win legitimately, so they do what they've always done, exploit a corrupt political system to bully and extort their way to what they want.

This is what SOPA/PIPA are really about and that is why you should oppose them. You are standing up for what your generation represents, just as previous generations have done the same on a slew of different issues. As much as those in power would like us to believe we are the apathetic, lazy generation. The truth is we are anything but and that scares the $@!& out of them.


Totalbiscuit posted this on his Facebook, I find it bares quite a bit of truth.

Copied and pasted from a post by LethalAffinity on Gamefaqs' Current Events message board. And it's completely true.

_________________
Favorite bands:

Melvins
The Jesus Lizard
Cows
Big Business
R***man
Minutemen
Flight
Minor Threat
Big Black
Shellac
Karp
Scratch Acid
Wipers
Pixies

Bizarre Dude...That is Bizarre......
I fail to see your logic, if indeed you are a storage facility which facilitates the retrieval of pirated goods...How do you surmise that you are not culpable...
bear in mind that this also falls under the RICO Act...
there is no distinction of one hand doesn't know what the other is doing and thus ignorance being bliss means innocence.....B.S.
It just cannot work that way,by the same token if you own a property and your renters are using it for controlled substance trafficking than You are responsible...in Knowing what is going on with your property...Thus you would lose or it would be confiscated......
Good luck trying to prove in court that you had no clue...That is too easy, which is exactly one of the reasons that the laws are written so that automatic forfeiture of said property is in effect.

No Way Floyd....
Wrong....Piracy is not good, if you think that... Then just wait until you have a viable product to sell and that product is in large demand, thus revenues are quite substantial.....Now someone comes along, carbon copies your product, undersells you......
You'll be screaming from the rooftops demanding justice.....and reparations....

The issue here is about a legitimate site being shut down because of a pirate operation somewhere on the site, not if the entire site is focused on Piracy.....
This really gets complex and the Devil is in the Details......

_________________
"C'est parti mon Kiki "

And yet just about any professional musician currently in the business completely disagrees with you. Why expend time, money, and energy trying to keep people from hearing your music? If they hear it, then they come to a show (buy a ticket), buy merch, etc.. Music sales make next to nothing, and in this day and age the main purpose of the recorded music is to get people to come to your show. Anyone saying otherwise is simply clinging to old, outdated ways and trying to pretend the industry is the same thing it was 20 years ago. It's not. The internet has drastically changed it, and anyone not willing to adapt to the changes and take it in stride should and will just be left in the dust to watch their idea of "how things should be" slowly suffocate.

_________________
Favorite bands:

Melvins
The Jesus Lizard
Cows
Big Business
R***man
Minutemen
Flight
Minor Threat
Big Black
Shellac
Karp
Scratch Acid
Wipers
Pixies

But that is still a simplified generalization, you are assuming that everyone does not care if their music is downloaded, reedited and sent back out in a new format.
This is not about Old versus New, it is about property rights of the creator...If your thinking is the norm then the society we all live in would cease to exist, there would not be any boundaries as to where this would/could apply.
I just sank $200,000.00 in home renovations, someone just showed up loves it and claims the property as his/hers to do as they wish....

Are you saying that an artist has no rights of ownership of their product.. That once it is out there for the public to see or hear they ( the public ) are free to acquire said product and the artist is not entitled to claims of ownership or service fee's...

It's one thing for us all to listen to music, but to take that composition and do with it as we please is a whole other matter...
There just would not be commerce in any form if this was the case.....
Just a Free For All, everyone takes as they please, no one earns revenues for services rendered.

Thanks But No Thanks....That world is destined to self destruct and the last few thousand years of human history disprove your standpoint....

_________________
"C'est parti mon Kiki "

Its not about the creator loosing out its the label that is loosing out. Selling the music is where they make their money.

Your analogy there.... it doesn't work... at all...


Piracy does not remove it from the ownership of the creator or keep them from making money from it (LIVE. F***ING. ACTS.), it's merely making a copy. And the labels make PLENTY of money from these shows too. Usually, they get a cut of money from anything with the band's name on it.

_________________
Favorite bands:

Melvins
The Jesus Lizard
Cows
Big Business
R***man
Minutemen
Flight
Minor Threat
Big Black
Shellac
Karp
Scratch Acid
Wipers
Pixies

Piracy has been around for ages. We would buy vinyl records and copy them onto 8 track or cassette and trade them with friends. We even recorded "The King Biscuit Flower Hour" off the radio and brought portable recorders to concerts. Not to mention cameras too.
All the performers created this mess making downloads so accessible. They've also been gouging people forever with the price of CD's, concerts and downloaded music. The Grateful Dead never whined about piracy, they even had bootleg recording sections at their concerts.

It's all about greed and money period.

_________________
Life...... It's sexually transmitted and always fatal

Fahrenheit 451 is coming to life. If something media related makes someone uncomfortable, do away with it. If someone deviates from the government standard, do away with them. Kill off anything that isn't happiness until everyone is existing, rather than living. In fact, I feel that no one really lives now. I think technology has killed the meaning of life, and what it means to live. When was the last time you ran about all night, with nothing but the clothes on your back and the friends by your side? It's been a long time for me. I feel like a misfit for saying this, but I feel it's right. If we broke away from our dependence on technology, the world would be a better place, and this is coming from someone who makes money repairing computers.

_________________
1984 Squier Contemporary Stratocaster
1986 Peavey Envoy 110
1967 Kingston Acoustic

as someone on google plus mentioned, under sopa if you upload a michael jackson track you go to jail for 5 years.

The doctor who killed michael jackson got 4 years.

_________________
Fender Blacktop Stratocaster HH Sonic Blue

Fender american special telecaster Olympic White

Squier Vintage Modified Jaguar Surf Green

Vox VT40+

That's called your youth mate.

We are no way close to F.451, let's not exaggerate here, there are no restrictions as far as getting out and running around, protesting if you will or figuring out a different direction in your life, be it career or freetime.

This is still about ownership rights and just how far the envelope has been pushed. to the point that now, the extreme solution of shut it all down is the band-aid for a Laissez Faire agenda.

As was pointed out, just because the practice is rampant, it does not legitimize it's practice.
It is one thing to download something and use it as a personal playlist, that has actually been allowed for a very long time....The problem is of using that recording, repackaging it and using it as revenue source when you had no input into it's creation. It is theft and it is pretty simple to understand, you cannot download copyrighted material and either send it out or facilitate the retrieval of copyrighted material.

As I posted if people cannot understand or refuse to understand the distinction then it is a lost cause to whoever gets snagged.
I do however dispute the policy of just throwing a big net and seeing what was caught.....
That is the problem with SOPA, it does not differentiate..

_________________
"C'est parti mon Kiki "

this is excatly how i feel. technology and all the stuff that comes under the umbrella of cyber world and digital downloads is litterally destroying the human race. the vast majority of generation z and y (aka, D-U-M-B generation) are becoming so dependent on technology and the cyber world that there attention span is now like a three toed sloth's, they all talk through the cyber world rather than face to face, they all see the world with a filter that blocks out the negatives about this world that make people live. theyre existing in a artificial world. when i hang out with my mate, litterally 90% of the time he has his phone out and is talking to people via facebook. he does that most of the day, and you should see him; he has the dullest mind youd ever come accross and the attentoin span of a toothpick. technology and the cyber world have destroyed him. example, he, along with almost every other digital native that went on the outback trip did not even see the slightest bit of beauty in uluru, or the olgas or anything for that matter. my mum did that excact same trip with my school when she was in year 9, she said everyone felt such a rush when they were in that area it was unbelievable, they never wanted to leave.
i feel extremely humiliated to be part of this generation, i mean i hear stories from my parents and i envy them for being born when they were. i feel as if im the only one in my town who actually goes out to skate at night, or actually buy's CD's whenever i get the chance, or doesnt have my phone out every 5 #$@*&!% seconds. i'd much rather be sitting on the roof watching the sunset than playing call of duty mw2 zombies, or sitting inside making a facebook status about how much i 'love' my 'girlfriend' when i havent even talked to her in real person and she just added me 5 minutes ago.
basically, give it atleast 50 years and we'll all just exist, living will be a past generation term. sorry to say, its what i feel

sorry if i went a litle offtopic, just had to give my opinion on this generation like buxom did

_________________
former user radio_friendly_unit_shifter