Peer Pressure Works!

Yes, that would be the title of a bestseller likely to simply ROCKET off the shelves. I can hear it now…the voices of children, stuttering with excitement about a soon to be released treatise on the unfair balance between government regulation and the oft-trampled rights of the consumer. Perhaps the main character could be a 14 year old 19th century English boy named Steven…he’d travel forward through time and explain how things came to be, then die of black lung resulting from his 4 years employed as a chimney sweep. What a ROLLICKING good time that book would be! I’d like to use a pop-up format …it would make the final scene with little Steven coughing up his own darkened lung tissue so much more compelling.

Anyway, today the verdict came down in the case against the founders and apparent financial backer of The Pirate Bay. Well, actually the verdict didn’t technically come down…yet everyone knows what it is. How that’s even possible without any of that pesky ‘government interference’, I have no fucking idea, but I’m sure we can’t possibly accuse a government of LYING to the ELECTORATE can we?! Why the scandal would drive the populace in to a blood rage of making some sort of loud exclamation while reading about it, then hurrying to their keyboards to type up an angry spiel about the goddamn politicians and how they…oh…

Call me crazy, but I was actually a little bit surprised at the fact that the rendered verdict was guilty. I dunno, I guess I just always assumed that when the Prosecution presents a ‘case’ consisting of claims they didn’t back up, ‘expert witnesses’ who didn’t seem to have the slightest fucking clue what they were talking about, and desperate pleas for anonymous backing of the major case points themselves, MAYBE they haven’t exactly presented a winner of an argument. Yet that is precisely the ‘case’ the prosecution did present…and rather than it resulting in their being lit on fire and laughed at as they screamed and burned for wasting the court’s time, it has apparently resulted in a conviction.

Now, it probably didn’t exactly help the Pirate Bay guys out with their assertion that they don’t profit from piracy when they, a couple weeks ago, announced plans to set up a side deal for TPB users who could pay a fee and access higher speed downloads featuring full ISP masking of what they’re doing. Note to Swedish pirate sites…it’s a little bit difficult to say you aren’t profiting or trying to profit from piracy when you announce plans…to profit from piracy. Maybe make a note of that.

Now we reach the next bizarre aspect of this case. It’s not surprising at all that they were fined (about $905,000 apiece)…though it remains an utterly spurious amount made up by empty suit wearing jagoffs actually claiming that every single pirated copy of something represents a lost sale. However, they also each received a wonderful bonus prize…they each get to spend a year in prison! Now, Swedish prison is actually quite nice. They went all in when it came to slanting their penal system towards being more of a rehabilitation based system than one designed to do any of that icky punishing. That doesn’t excuse the fact that a group of people were found guilty of a crime that ISN’T a felony under Swedish law, and were still given time. That’s like me getting prison time for punching Steven Harper in the face when he tries his best to ’smile’ (something nobody in their right mind could possibly call a crime. There are people suffering from Bell’s Palsy with a more ‘normal’ looking grin than the terrifying ‘killer android about to fuck people up’ look that wooden bastard has. A smile that ‘natural’ can only be the result of a system of cranks and pulleys).

Now, let’s be honest here…these motherfuckers were dead bang guilty as Hell. Nobody in their right mind would argue they weren’t (unless you’re one of those all-hemp-clothing, raw food chomping ‘Everything should be free, maaaannnnn’ superhippies, in which case I encourage you to wrap yourself in a bomb and explode…preferably at a Phish concern, where nobody of importance will be taken with you. If you can get on stage, even better). But now we get to deal with the result…and the result is that all of these dumb, out of touch fucking dimwits running big entertainment ventures will pretend that “Well, that whole bittorrent thing is over. It’s business as usual!” and go back to ripping everyone off and snorting lines of high end Bolivian coke off the ass off high prices hookers. They’ll keep charging 20 bucks for a 33 cent piece of plastic with some music burned on to it. They’ll keep charging 30 dollars for a 33 cent chunk of plastic with a movie burned on to it (Oh, we can charge that much more because it has the words Blu and Ray stamped on it, and includes ANOTHER 2 hours of extra shit we dredged up from a garbage pit where it should have stayed nestled until the end of time!). These fucking twats more than likely expect that we’ll be back to the days of the diamond selling artist. Hell, they sued Napster…it went away. This will be the same!

Except it won’t. Hell, Pirate Bay isn’t even the biggest (or best) torrent site out there! So, whatcha gonna do…sue every one of them? I hope so…for one reason. Since their whole argument against Pirate Bay really boiled down to ‘You can use it to find torrents’, I can’t WAIT for the lawsuit against…Google. After all, I can use Google to find torrents, too. I want that lawsuit so bad I…uhhh…well, I’ll just go change my pants.

Seriously, one megacorp suing another…who wouldn’t enjoy that?! Of course, the RIAA will continue their BRILLIANT series of lawsuits for insane amounts of money against those college students and janitors and the like who have managed to destroy the entire industry. Yeah, it was some kid toking up at night in his dorm room at Duke, downloading a copy of a Bob Marley album he doesn’t feel like paying 23 bucks for…he broke the whole thing. Not you, you greedy fucking cunts, feeding us one hype over anything meaningful ‘artist’ after another…one more hot starlet type who doesn’t fucking sing her stuff live because, oh, she has to DANCE…one more massively overproduced album from a band because of the need to cover up the fact they can’t play their fucking instruments any better than a mentally handicapped chimp with his feet replaced by egg beaters (it was an early Dr. Moreau experiment)…one more artist who doesn’t sing or write about anything worth a fuck, but goddamn do they look great in jeans (cause, you know, music is all about how the performer LOOKS). No, they aren’t in ANY way responsible, throwing all that shit at us and then having the balls to tell us that is somehow worth 20 dollars a shot. Jesus, morons, even some of your own ARTISTS have had it with you! And when you DO try to lurch horribly in to the 21st Century like Frankenstein the fucking mongoloid, what do we get? Hey, legal music downloads…oh, they’re jammed up the ass with DRM to completely restrict you from DOING anything with them…wait, that BOTHERS you? Okay, we’ll let iTunes sell it without the DRM…but you have to pay us $1.99 A SONG to have it removed from your existing collection. The movie industry is the same…spending such a ludicrous amount of money on the latest summer piece of shit from Michael Bay (seriously, I want his next movie to actually be ‘Steaming Pile of Turd’…I would see that!) that they charge insane transfer fees to theaters to actually show them. They in turn pass that one with $13 tickets and popcorn you need a second mortgage and bank approval to purchase. And then what do we get? Some motherfucker who builds sets for a living asking us to “Pretty please, stop pirating movies before the terrorists win and rape my little girl!” Dude, I have no problem with you…I don’t doubt times ARE tough for you…but it’s probably because of the dipshit running the studio that greenlit Eddie Murphy’s last 17 abominations (How the fuck does that hack keep getting WORK?! Seriously! His movies don’t even make MONEY anymore!) as opposed to me…and seriously, you could make some money if you filmed that whole Saudi rape thing…

Nope, these dim bulb bitches are going to try and go back to how it was, when that’s about as fucking likely as Pig Latin becoming the official language of Trumpland…it used to be Guatemala until Donald bought it and converted it in to “The greatest guerrilla warfare center in the world today!”. And that’s what infuriates me about this whole fucking thing…you know who REALLY got hit with a verdict of guilty? The consumer.

And bringing it a little closer to home for most of us (excluding those few Haitian readers who keep looking at this site, no doubt under the misguided impression I am the one called ‘Generalissimo Salazar’ and will be their benefactor against the oppression they face every day. Sorry guys, you have the wrong URL…oh, you don’t speak English? Well, continue learning the good words, then…douchebag…cunt…harbinger…), we have to latest attempts by the Canadian Music and Movie Industry lobbyists (no doubt a couple brothers in overalls and straw hats who enjoy dancing to jug music and kin fucking) to beef up copyright laws. And who are they doing it for? Oh, this is priceless…it’s not for the children, it’s for…the truck drivers. Yes, it seems that too many truckers are losing their jobs now that not as many CDs and DVDs are shipped as physical products anymore.  Wait, couldn’t that have the slightest bit to do with that whole DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION THING?! (By the way, for people who think I’m making this up…here is the original Slashdot story about this, and here is Michael Geist’s writeup, which includes the whole copyright FAQ…less factual than utterly full of shit…produced by the lobbyists.)

Yep, we get to be in the same boat with everyone else…a boat run by a group of jagoffs so utterly incompetent that Captain Hazelwood of the Exxon Valdez really would be a better choice at the helm, and that’s AFTER he’s tucked in to his second fifth of gin for the night. A group of whining liars who like to claim that everyone who pirated something would have TOTALLY bought it if those nasty buccaneers hadn’t threatened them with lashings and forced them to steal it! A group of self righteous wastes of skin who are trying to push Bill C-61…the sequel on to all of us. Of course, according to THEM C-61 was written by the angels themselves, and would have guaranteed Canada would be the best darn movie and music maker in that big old world out there! To anyone with a fucking brain cell still functioning, it tended to read more like a RIDICULOUS change to copyright law that would have had a disastrous effect on everything from consumer rights to medical research…but fuck those AIDS patients whose cure could be tied up in litigious red tape, we need to spew forth the next Nickelback…besides, if those preening faggots could be bothered to put on a condom, they’d be fine!

Of course, it has to pass the government first. And despite the fact they’ve been lobbying like crazy, I feel secure in the knowledge that the Canadian parliamentary system will protect us…

We’re fucked.