Musicians say they were getting a better deal with MegaUpload and are angry the site was taken down.
This story details some of the many non infringing uses and advantages of the service. The main reason people use file sharing services is that ISPs don't provide reasonable bandwidth and non free software is intentionally limited and insecure. The software most people get with their computers lacks utilities like OpenSSH. US upload rates are still comparable to analog DSL and ISPs often block and rate limit anything that looks encrypted. Open Spectrum and free software are ways around this kind of censorship.
So, when folks continue to allege that the bills target only illegal foreign sites, do they know better?
Groklaw does a SOPA opinion round up, quoting engineers, artists and lawmakers.
As an industry, we've been able to rationalize that bad laws and politics don't matter, but now we're waking up. More importantly, this has also gotten the attention of "the Internet," meaning a lot of the people who use the Net. That includes some really smart Hill staffers who believe in the democratic potential of the Net.
Referring to Hollywood, Y Combinator wrote: ”The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.” The blog post, which was titled “Kill Hollywood,” also offered advice to start-ups and entrepreneurs who wanted to help to hasten its demise.
This is a good idea and it's time has come. Digital production and distribution are so cheap that there's no longer a reason for resources to be concentrated in any one place or for a small number of firms to have a lock on our imaginations.
How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?
The silly, pro-Microsoft and anti-Google statements in this article almost kept me from linking to it.