That’s not how Western democracies work
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.
Sweden not joining the Euro — what does it mean?
One day after the referendum took place in Sweden, anti-Euro campaigners all over the UK express their satisfaction and assure everyone that the UK should and will not adopt the Euro for years to come. But what does this mean for the UK and what does it mean for Europe?
Reading the opinions and polls taken by the BBC yesterday, it was clear to me that most people that voted ‘yes’ were pretty clear as to why they chose to do that. On the contrary, almost everyone voting ‘no’ either claimed ignorance, fear for something new or indifference. Not a single person (out of those interviewed by the BBC Online) had any serious or economically valid comment to make with regards to the ‘no’ vote that they cast earlier that day, although, of course, there are several arguments in favour of this decision.
It seems to me that, both in the UK, Sweden and in other countries outside the Eurozone, the majority of people against the adoption of the single currency are entrenched with politics and erroneous beliefs — most of them completely irrelevant to economics — and fail to see the true potential of the Euro as a European currency. They attach political beliefs, social beliefs and decades old ideology to something new, something purely economical (in the scientific sense), something that, in my view, in the long term will definitely help preserve the culture, society and values of Europe, by keeping/making Europe a stronger economic power in the world arena.
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