A Change Of View?

Politicians Turned Away from Entertainment Industry

Online protests against entertainment industry taking over the American Justice system seem to have got the message to the US politicians that the world is hacked off with them. Press reports show that those politicians who stood for the entertainment industry are now switching sides. The reason is that they finally realized that their careers will be that much tougher when they are treated negatively by their voters.
Apparently, the entertainment industry is realizing that its Washington campaign is faltering. For example, the Motion Picture Association of America described the opposition as an “abuse of power”. In other words, the MPAA really doesn’t know what to do. Recently, Wikipedia, the global free online encyclopedia, went offline for 24 hours. Google and others also used the black censorship bars in attempts to draw attention to what had earlier been a legislative proposal to curb access to foreign websites engaged into infringing the copyright.

Websites that participated in the blackout asked their visitors to reach their legislators on the question, and perhaps they did exactly that. After that, such sponsors of the bill as Senators Roy Blunt, Chuck Grassley, Marco Rubio, and many more announced that they were withdrawing their support. Meanwhile, the others began to attack Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for rushing the Senate version of the legislation. However, it can’t be Reid’s fault, because he was just doing what he was told. In addition, with political apathy in America about such issues he could think it was good to get campaign contributions from the entertainment industry for the coming elections.

In switching sides, some of the earlier bill supporters called it “deeply flawed”, while the others cited “unintended consequences” able to stem from the proposed legislation. All of them claimed that they supported taking action against Internet piracy. The others specified that they supported changes to the law.

Creative America – a studio- and union-supported outfit fighting online piracy, started a TV advertising campaign to air in the areas of key legislators. For example, in Times Square, it turned on a digital pro-SOPA and PIPA billboard in space offered by News Corp that owns Fox Studios. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch is again known as a support of SOPA and PIPA and has dubbed Google a pirate.