Yesterday was "American censorship day" a day of "protest" against a bill in the US Congress seeking to finally do something about the wholesale theft of intellectual property and total disregard of artist copyright across the internet.
It was presented as some kind of movement for freedom and truth against the evil empires of large media corporations. As is often the case it was the usual mess of misinformation, scaremongering and downright lies.
To equate the "freedom" to steal from, cheat, defraud and rob writers, photographers, musicians and film makers of legitimate income with social revolutions in countries that suffer from despotic rule is nothing short of obscene and the propoganda that these opponents of common justice put out is a disgrace.
There is NO justification whatsoever in illegally downloading material and it is just the same as breaking into peoples houses and stealing their property. Have we reached such a state in society that people think this mass disregard for creativity and achievement is acceptable? It seems we have. It disregards the people who create the movies, music, books and photographs that inspire, enlighten and entertain us, it disregards the millions of people worldwide who are involved in the media industries and their livelihoods and all so you can get a copy of Avatar without paying for it.
So what kind of society do we end up with? A society where no-one creates anything worthwhile because they can't afford to do it or can't earn an income doing it, so what passes for art is people posting meaningless drivel on some social network site. Yesterdays branding of media companies as evil and torrent sites, search engines, and social networking sites as bastions of truth and freedom is offensive and a perversion of the truth.
The very people amongst us we should be respecting are being cheated and insulted, and the people who are pumping out a non-stop stream of trivia in order to generate advertising revenue are lauded as champions of liberty and truth. What on earth happened? How on earth did we get to this?