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Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

Cary Sherman, the RIAA CEO, has a degree from Harvard in law. Sherman's compensation package from the RIAA was $3.2 million. In 2010, Sherman helped the RIAA secure a $105 million settlement from LimeWire for copyright infringement. The guy is a self described lobbyist and he has the guts to challenge google and wikipedia of demagogy? (a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, vanities and expectations of the public).

He's probably smart enough to realize the typical "you're a hipocrite" backlash, I wonder what his goal in this piece is? If we are going to win the internet censorship, internet ownership, and intellectual property legal battles we have to find a way to make it financially unwise to launch campaigns to sustain business models that can't tolerate freedom to transmit any data we want with uncensored internet connections.

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I think it's important to realize that we (the general public) are not the intended audience for statements like this. The RIAA/MPAA are lobbyist Organizations that are failing to pass legislature. They are legal teams that are losing steam in the court room. Their "customers"/investors are the various studios that have banded together to find means to sustain a dying business model.

Make no mistake, these are the death throes of the RIAA/MPAA

These statements lack the confidence of secure financial backing. These statements are basically saying, "We are doing what you asked of us, it's not our fault it isn't working", and the studios aren't amused.

Spot on. There's no other reason for a NYT op-ed other than to send the message that: "Hey we're doing what you paid us to do; what do you want from us?!"

"lobbyist", "you're", and your MongoDB server is down along with your website. No e-mail/twitter in your profile, so figured I'd tell you here.

Pedantic Geek strikes again!

"You made a typo and your website is down" takes pedantry to a whole new level :P

HN need a "Reddit indicator" for users, if too many of your posts reek like Reddit or 4Chan, then your comments are kept, just moved to a new thread on Reddit/4Chan. Need it soon, Reddit trolls users are flooding into HN last 6 months.

Tell me where the 4chan threads will be so I can find you there.

As far as I can tell Grossman is an established professional with quite a portfolio.

From your profile, I see a whimsical Twitter stream.

So who's going where in your little scheme again?

To be fair, my throwing in grammar corrections with the note about his site being down was pretty reddit-like.

Sure and I agree on that point, but if I go by your HN profiles for who gets the most benefit the doubt, your track record beats his by infinity (we're dividing by zero here).

Well it makes sense that the demagogues are the ones to accuse others of demagogy, isn't it?

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