Download illegally & lose the internet

[TBear]

Apparently pressure is being put on the internet providers. My provider isn't on the list but those with Time Warner might watch out.

I'm just glad it isn't affecting uploading and downloading fights.

[The Tase]

holy **** wtf is this? i thought sopa was dead?

[The Tase]

it has begun....

[The Tase]

is this not such a big deal?

[Cardinal Buck]

And what if you're stealing the internet to begin with? This friend I know might be jeopardizing his neighbors' connections.

[-jose-]

Shit just got real!

[B.U.R.N.E.R]

Yawn.............

[Dr Rumack]

At the risk of dramatizing the whole thing, there is a secret war going on, one conducted primarily by the major players in the 'entertainment' industry and the aim is to dramatically change the internet as we've understood it for the last 10 years or so.

The big problem for those companies is that internet is incredibly difficult to exercise any sort of control over, without introducing draconian penalties on a massive scale to scare people into compliance.

But the use of music, pictures, tv and movie footage has become so widespread that they basically have to declare war on internet culture itself to succeed.

In cultural terms, this is one of the first 'read-write' generations in decades, meaning that this is one of the first generations in decades to not just consume culture generated by the media industry (read), but to actually generate cultural output on a massive scale themselves (write).

Creating and contrinuting to videos, blogs, memes, discussion forums, all these are forms of cultural output that people nowadays engage in on a daily basis. Our parents' generation didn't do this. They watched movies and tv, they read books and newspapers, they bought records, but they didn't generate any cultural output themselves on anything remotely close to the scale on which it is being generated by people today.

It genuinely is a cultural revolution, the likes of which has never been seen before. Even a site like this one is, in historical terms, revolutionary. Our parents and our grandparents could never have imagined that they could have constructed an argument or expressed a point of view and have it seen by thousands of people from around the world, instantly. We're so used to it we don't even realise how mind-blowingly different it is to anything that came before.

The entertainment industry in its current form is massively threatened by this, and they have no option but to fight it. Can they succeed? Very possibly. But only in the short term. The genie is out of the bottle, and the devil himself could not halt this cultural revolution now.