http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk
When one oligopoly owns the vast majority of contemporary popular culture, we, the populace, should be expecting a lot more in return.
Exactly, in as much detail as you can be patient enough to provide, how does "effective cultural participation" require you to see shitty new-release Hollywood movies?
Is Marco Arment culturally disconnected?
http://www.marco.org/2015/04/11/popular-movies-i-havent-seen
But I felt left out because of a lot of things. I wasn't a member of the dominant religion. I came into that school knowing nobody, because I didn't attend one of the elementary schools that fed into it. I didn't live in the neighborhood (my parents got me to go to that school rather than the one I was geographically supposed to attend because it had fewer knife fights.) And, I was a nerd.
So the actual amount I was "left out of things" because of not having a TV and therefore being unable to effectively culturally participate was... pretty small.
That was in junior high. Today, it's even less relevant to me. There's a conversation about a movie I didn't see? "Nope, didn't see it." If they are uncaring enough to keep having the conversation about that for the next 20 minutes, well, I'll just do something else. Or I'll listen, learn a bit about a movie I didn't see, go to Wikipedia and read about the plot, and save about two hours and $7.
I feel like, if you don't know where your local MLB team is in the standings today, you probably don't have a lot of standing to make arguments about US cultural disconnection.
Of course, if you apply this to all movies, books, and music under copyright you'd not only be culturally disconnected, you'd be culturally dead, so I do think the original comment is spot on.
There's no one item, no short list, of essential works that define the threshold between effective and ineffective cultural participation. But there is a compounding social effect for each movie/song/book/etc. someone doesn't know. Each additional water cooler conversation that one cannot join, and each additional movie reference missed, is one step further away from those friends. At some point, people stop trying to communicate with someone who doesn't understand them.
Beyond mere socialization and entertainment, popular culture forms the behavioral and memetic vocabulary with which people communicate. As an example of how isolating cultural non-participation can be, consider how difficult it is for escapees from fundamentalist religious communes to integrate into society. That is the extreme end of a spectrum, and each decision not to participate in one's local popular culture moves one closer to that extreme.
I'm not saying piracy is right; I'm saying that the choice not to consume is inextricably linked to a whole lot of other choices, including whether to participate in society at all.
Given all that, it is unconscionable for Hollywood et al. to wield the amount of power they have demonstrated in the provisions in leaked TPP drafts and other laws and treaties.
I think that's a stretch.
Some things in life are essential to functioning effectively in modern society, like the abilities to have a stable home, to travel, to communicate, and to transact financially. Some infrastructure is then necessary to support these things, like sources of power and water for your home, effective transport and communication networks, and reliable currency. Losing access to these things is very bad, and so it is reasonable to consider measures like government regulation and universal/unbiased provision to protect that access.
On the other hand, the world is full of people with different tastes and different cultures. Sharing some specific entertainment may provide a bit of enjoyable discussion around the family dinner table or office water cooler later, but it's hardly essential in the big picture.
Then why bother with criminalizing circumvention and perpetually extending copyrights?
Really? What about your local "mom & pop" design shops doing signage work for small businesses and ads for regional magazines? Are the type foundries that dedicated to tracking down pirates?
Without commenting on the piracy of fonts, and as a non-designer myself, this is definitely a non-designer's perspective :-).