Dealing with illegal file-sharing is a job for the police. It is their job to enforce the law. Now we have given private corporations the legal right to go after our civilians. That's not how Western democracies work.[...]
In a study, 80% of people thought we shouldn't go after file-sharers. But ask them how they feel about taking money out of the pockets of musicians, authors or artists and that number falls by a significant amount.
Ultimately we have to change peoples perception on file-sharing.
Indeed we do. But most importantly we have to change executives' in those media multinationals perception on culture, art, freedom of communication and privacy as well as protect our liberties from unbounded profit and greed.
If file sharing did anything, besides rendering the status quo obsolete, it was to bring to the spotlight on how slanted and unfair the media industry is: favouring less than 1% of the artists globally, fixing prices to maximise profit, compromising on our very own cultural foundations through the systematic, condescending promotion of junk while at the same time making thousands of executives rich for no reason whatsoever. There's no doubt that stealing is bad, although I'm not so sure that not-for-profit sharing of digital copies is. What I am sure about is that what the industry is accustomed to doing --- and keeps trying to achieve, now through the institutions --- is worse.
