There is a significant problem with these laws (acts, agreements, whatever) even if you don’t care about IP legislation at all.
The current entertainment industry arose under a certain set of conditions. These condition have changed and the industry is failing to keep pace1. So instead of transforming into something modern they attempt to change the conditions back to their outdated state via the law.
Let me make an analogy: imagine that Catholic priests started lobbying for the state to ban atheism because they were losing their jobs. The current legislation is the same thing for the entertainment industry.
Many people view the current protests as some sort of hippie free-lunch2 absurdity. What is in fact at stake is however a core value of capitalism: if you can’t make a profit with your product, you don’t make the government protect your market, you make your product better or you shrivel up and die.
Actually it’s not even doing so bad, but that’s a separate issue.
The Pirate culture tends to elicit such views with slogans such as “Sharing is caring” .
Google just reported several extremely interesting things:
China launched a targeted and sophisticated attack against Google’s infrastructure (emphasis mine). I dare to speculate that China is following Russia’s lead in creating a highly qualified cyber-warfare unit and is not shy in using it.
Google (apart from posting it to the public) claims to have reported this to US authorities. These have traditionally ignored cyberterrorism. However this seems to be the clearest case of government endorsed attack to date. Lets hope that the US chooses to do something.
Google decided to revert it’s controversial decision to censor it’s Chinese results. This is clearly a retribution of some sort. Google also writes that it is prepared to leave China for good - clearly a statement of not being threatened. It is also quite a powerful threat.
Imagine if Google suddenly stopped working. I presume since you are reading this blog you would be fine. But there are millions of users for whom Google is the internet. Plus a lot of Chinese users (probably including government officials) would loose their Gmail data and their calendars.
I imagine China is facing a tough decision with this.
