Wednesday, December 21st 2011

News:  Hypocritical Mass

RIAA Caught Pirating Music & TV Shows, Nothing Happens

By Skwerl

We recently published a thorough explanation of the real reasons behind lobbying organizations like the RIAA and MPAA’s crusade against content piracy, and we’re all sick of hearing them cry wolf about how much it’s hurting the artists as the music and movie industries navigate such dark, dire straits while maintaining massive salaries for executives and annual profits right on par with what they were reporting pre-YouTube (while, of course, continuing to fuck the artists harder than anyone else).

In summary, it’s all about control and preservation of an obsolete business model that would just cost too much to rebuild. You’d have to fire all of the technically-retarded people at the top and start fresh. No, it makes more sense to just buy some congressmen and rewrite American capitalism as a system where the “free” market can be bought, owned, and lorded over by the highest bidder.

But if you need more evidence to support this theory of ours that the labels, RIAA, and MPAA don’t really believe any of the bullshit their lobbyists are pushing, let’s consult You Have Downloaded, a site that tracks who downloads copyrighted content via BitTorrent. They have information for over 50 million users. That’s just a fraction of all public torrent downloads, but TorrentFreak has traced IPs to Sony, Universal, Fox, the office of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and now, the Department of Homeland Security and the RIAA.

Now, some of the music RIAA torrented (Jay-Z and Kanye) could have been done for “research purposes” (though, you know, probably not). But how do you explain a download of the first five seasons of the TV show Dexter, an episode of Law And Order SVU, and some audio software? If we follow RIAA’s insistence that one pirated item should incur a penalty of up to $150,000, we’re looking of a theft of $9,000,000.

By the way, for the record, here’s what You Have Downloaded says when I go there:

Regardless, you can bet that I’ll be answering to a federal agent for blogging sooner than RIAA will be investigated for stealing $9 million dollars’ worth of Hollywood’s crops.