Laws being passed in America effect the whole world, unfortunately. With corporate establishments and those with the most money making essentially all of the calls.
Calling it “america-bashing” is hardly fair, when truth hurts, remember that it only hurts because you know that it is truth. America has been doing its best to control international law for a very long time, and why would it stop? Simple really, it won’t.
To me really SOPA, PIPA and other laws are just a complete load of bollocks. Greedy people wanting more money from more lawsuits against the poor (or, relatively poor, if you prefer that). Really, companies like Universal Records don’t need any more money. They earn more money per year just from interviews and royalties in shitty TV ads than what anybody watching those ads and those interviews could even dream about. I think that people should pay money for stuff, yes. What they shouldn’t be doing is paying more than what things are worth.
How much money does a download of iTunes cost? Between $1~ and $2~. Not that much, but now take into consideration how much it costs for each one of those to be “sold” to a person. How much? Well, say a song gets downloaded 500,000 times (for a pop song, this is between average and low), how much did that cost in electricity and server runtime for iTunes/insertrecordcompanyhere? Considering that those servers are actually running for more than just one song at a time, virtually $0.00001 per download is what that song actually costs for them to sell. And how much money in production in the first place? Less than $10,000. (and considering the quality of most music today, should have cost about $100. But I digress…)
See my point? Things should be cheaper than they are. And greedy people at the heads of bullshit companies are making all the profit. And they STILL WANT MORE.
I am not saying you should illegally download things, I am not saying that breaching copyright is OK. What I am saying is that the American Government is in it to make themselves richer, and the fat-cats happy. Of course, this is not exclusive to America, this is a common theme, but america controlling the whole world with its grip around the nut-sacks of almost all governments is not a good thing to be happening. They have the power with these laws to essentially force anybody from anywhere to do anything, as long as they have the “evidence” to charge them. Then they can simply extradite them to wherever.
/rant
Other than that, I am surprised this thread isn’t already locked…