It’s So Easy To Become A Criminal?

Disagree with RIAA? - A criminal!

The CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America has concluded that everyone who complained about the entertainment industry’s cunning plan to control the web is a criminal.
Cary Sherman has written in the New York Times that the campaign that was launched against the new copyright bills SOPA and PIPA was unfair. He insisted that Wikipedia and other opponents had fed Internet users with misinformation about what the bills really meant. Those have been claiming that SOPA and PIPA led to online filtering which would have put the United States on a par with such countries as China.

Cary Sherman pointed out that it wasn’t really the case. Perhaps, he means that online filtering in China was effected by the state, and the same would have been about these bills if they were enforced by the entertainment industry. Sherman emphasized that there was actually no difference between what was being touted in Stop Online Piracy Act and what happens when a US court, upon an accurate review of evidence, has ruled something to be unauthorized and when the authorities close down a shop fencing stolen products.

In response, industry observers point out that Sherman seems to be missing the fact that the bills in fact didn’t involve any evidence or courts at all. Indeed, the new legislation says that an individual could lose their online connections simply on the say so of the entertainment industry.

Cary Sherman claimed that although some of the opponents of both bills were undoubtedly worried about the way the legislation would be interpreted, most of them were people who believed that the creative content should be free. He wondered how many of the opposing e-mails were from the same users who had previously attacked the websites of the Department of Justice, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and many other outfits supporting anti-piracy laws in revenge to the recent seizure of a cyberlocker giant MegaUpload within the frames of an international digital piracy operation.

Sherman believes and wants everyone else to believe that it was hackers like the worldwide-known group Anonymous who engage in real filtering by stifling the speech of people with whom they disagree.