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SOPA, PIPA and property.

In honor of a free and easy flow of information on the internet, I urge you to get a drink and listen freely to this beautiful song as you read this post.
Thanks.

It's been a week or so, mainly because my internet has been giving me shit. Wirelessing with 20 kb/s makes it hard to do anything, so next month I will get a superior net and hopefully will post more frequent content, but for now I want to talk about SOPA and PIPA.

I don't live in the USA but what I know is that these two laws were meant to protect "intellectual property", however they posed a threat to freedom of speech, and the whole internet gathered against them: Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, etc. And so the the bills got postponed, meaning they will be re-viewed and tried to be applied in the future, I guess.

So first of all, the Stop Online Piracy Act would be ineffective. What it would do, is limit interaction and nothing else. For instance, after the people built up against these laws, the federal government still shut down Megaupload, a giant website of the internet. What did that accomplish, and what it would have accomplish even if the bills got passed ?
Would it stop internet piracy ? Hell no. It's called piracy for a reason you know.. because people find a way to get it done. There are always ways around it on the internet. It's statistically impossible to stop internet piracy simply due to the massive amount of transfered data per second. Ziping, putting passwords, sending encrypted files, using proxies, there are so many ways to do it.

Furthermore, those bills WOULD ruin freedom of speech, simply because of their ambiguous nature.
What IS intellectual property anyway ? Information flows naturally between people and it's insane to think anyone could define what should be protected, and what shouldn't. So here's a basic example: Say you have a conversation with someone about a certain topic. And a particular thing that he says, gives you an idea for an awesome movie or book that sells for millions of dollars. Was that his intellectual property, or is it your's ? It just doesn't make any sense to me, not only that, but the term "property" in general. Because as far as I know, you weren't born with anything. All the knowledge, all the goods, the food, everything was there, for you to take. Let's look at some brilliant writers. Did their brilliance just came about in them ? Or did they gather inspiration, information, and everything they needed from their environment, and made an effort to put it all together ? If that's the case, then the intellectual property they "stole" along the years, is immense ! Because each information a writer gained from other people, built up, like gathering raw material and making something. No one pays for the raw material in the information realm, so why should the final product cost ? Well anyway.. my point is that there is no intellectual property to be defended, and I understand that people want to be payed for a song or a movie they made. But from a rational point of view, they didn't make anything, and it shouldn't cost anything. Maybe reason is our answer to a world free of money and unnecessary greed.

Bottom line, SOPA and PIPA are just another example of how people try to claim things as their own. Also, we should ask if pirating a song or a movie is really stealing it, in the first place, because the standard definition of stealing would apply to physical objects as in : I stole a pen from someone, and now he has a pen in minus, making it an inconvenience for him. But if you simply Multiply the information you presumably are "stealing" such as pirate a song, then you really are not causing any inconvenience to begin with. Because if you are going to pirate a certain song, you surely are not interested in paying for it. So banning piracy will not make you buy that song either. The reason you pirate is either because you are poor, or any other practical reason. What this seems to be, is a simple notion that people observe : If you make people used to getting things for free, they will want more and more to exploit that. So what these bills are actually attempting, (if they pass) is a form of manipulation, too. At least that's the way I see it. I encourage everyone to comment here and give me your opinions on these bills.

Looking forward to your input, bye for now.

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