We haven’t really progressed beyond the year 2004, have we? With respect to copyright news, I mean. The latest: the “US Copyright Group” has filed suit against 20,000 BitTorrent users, with a cool 30,000 lawsuits now pending. If you total all the various different “Hollywood” (you know what I mean) lawsuits, that means that 80,000 Americans now face some sort of Hollywood lawsuit.
Now, you may be asking, “The US Copyright Group? Who’s that?” It’s “an ad-hoc coalition of independent film producers and with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance.”
Sounds like pure evil to me.
Naturally, some of the people targeted in the lawsuits have already settle, presumably for the usual couple thousand dollars. It’s hard to blame the average person in this scenario: why risk everything trying to taking on Big Hollywood & Its Lawyers when you can merely dip into your savings to avoid any further trouble?
I mean, it’s disgusting that people are faced with financial ruin (and perhaps criminal charges) or merely financial discomfort simply because they’ve downloaded some Lady Gaga song.
Crazy world we live in. We probably deserve a real life 2012, or for extraterrestrial dinosaurs to beat us up.