I like this, but it feels hypocritical after the recent domain seizures and bullshit internet and digital media laws, and past censoring / banning of documents. It's OK to break other nations' walls, but not your own, apparently.
Sure, stuff happens for crazy reasons. That's not because of the agenda of some mysterious weather god, or an elusive organization; it's because of a complex system of dumb entities bumping into each other. You can rationalize it as gods or Illuminate, but it's probably just random noise.
Sometimes stuff like the Patriot act can give a single actor a disproportionate amount of power, but they usually have no idea what to do with it; thankfully.
These are very separate sets of issues, and I think it's kinda sad that about half the comments in this thread are ignoring the issue this is about and jumping straight to whining about how the US Government won't let you pirate Battlestar Galactica.
Or perhaps you think Battlestar Galactica is actually a better reason to censor and oppress than, say, the threat of riots and political unrest. Not being snarky; I really can't tell from your comment.
Censoring an entertainment television show is not as oppressive to the general public as censoring political discussion.
If you censor political discussion, you can't even talk about how bad it is to censor anything---televisions shows included.
However, that's not to dismiss the oppressiveness of our current copyright regime, where the content industries are lobbying for even non-commercial infringement to be criminalized, and our government seems largely willing to go along.
As to the differences, yes, this is far from the piracy issues. But not from banning books or bypassing due process.