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Comment by westbywest | Hacker News Reader

The concern I see being voiced is less about protecting copyright, for which many protections already exist, and more about implementing a level of regulation/protectionism that is out of step with what is usually just a civil complaint. True, criminal penalties do exist in US for certain instances of willful copyright infringement, but it is still overwhelmingly an area where there must be a plaintiff for any litigation to occur.

It is appropriate to treat copyright infringement in the same way one treats the international opium trade?

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It is appropriate to treat copyright infringement in the same way one treats the international opium trade?

yeah, if you are: the RIAA or MPAA a news organization that doesn't want anyone blogging about the truthiness of your reporting a politician receiving money from these groups a politician wanting to censor certain information

i don't like that you merely have to be accused of infringement for bad things to happen. it'd be like getting accused of being a communist in the '50s. this feels like a big step towards global authoritarianism.

That's because it is a big step towards global authoritarianism. My wife is Hungarian, born in 1966 like myself, and she's deathly afraid of expressing political dissent in public venues like the Internet. That's what we're proposing to make the law now - that fear. Makes it ever so much easier to keep control, you see.

I've been going down this list, voting up things that seem interesting. And suddenly I thought "Bloody hell, I'm using my real name to criticise the government on the internet". And obviously, I've decided that I have no problem with that. But I'm a white, middle class, middle aged businessman, and a British subject rather than an American citizen. And I still thought it.

America's stupid "War on Drugs" has devastated large parts of the world. Is an equally stupid, and, more laughably, even more doomed to failure "War on Copyright" going to wreck the Internet and possibly freedom itself?

And this is Obama? Who was supposed to be the good guy?

It is very hard for Americans to comprehend the idea of blatant oppression by the government as Americas always had a gentler approach to oppressing it's citizenry. I have quite a few friends from eastern European origin and it is always peculiar when you get into a discussion about the government with them and their voice immediately drops into whisper. After all of these years thy still have it in the back of their mind that someone from the party could be listening. Pretty creepy stuff if you stop to think about it.

Well, I have a story about that, from 2005. We were in Hungary (oddly enough) and were watching a show in which you could SMS in stuff from your phone and it would scroll across the screen, and some of it was political in nature.

My then-12-year-old daughter said, "So I could say, 'Bush is an idiot' and it would show up on the screen?" (Yeah, my politics is always pretty obvious.)

I laughed and said, "Sure could!"

She thought it over and said, "But would my name be on it? Maybe that wouldn't be a good idea."

I realized at that point that it was safer to express political dissent at that time in freaking Hungary than in the United States of America, and that my daughter knew that. Talk about a blow-your-mind situation.

My wife will talk anybody's ear off about politics face-to-face, and she has entirely radical opinions for our venue of Indiana. But if it's on the record? No way. She says we just don't need that kind of trouble.

Many sectors of the law have been this way for awhile. It only takes an anonymous accusation for the FBI or DEA to raid your house, destroy it, seize your possessions, and never return them. You may only spend a few nights in jail but you'll never get your stuff back.

People have already been conditioned to accept this stuff as "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."

very true. and lets not forget they have incentive to act of any accusation since they get to seize a bunch of property and fund their department... i've heard that police departments in some places send the swat team for everything since they can seize whatever they want.

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