Now, I don't feel it's my place here to point out flagrant, fragrant, profoundly sad hypocrisy.
Wait a minute--yes it is!
It turns out that the persecution of The Pirate Bay has nothing to do with artists after all--and who would have thought? It appears that the money in damages that the organizations won is not going to any artist whatsoever, but only to fund "future anti-piracy activities".
Interestingly, this is supposed to be "recovered" money, meaning it is meant to replace money actually lost by the "wronged party". They keep telling us they are representing "the artists", and we keep on knowing they are lying, but it's nice to have documentary evidence.
Again, this just points out the madness of trying to stop or penalize casual copying on the internet--which is always and only a giant peer to peer file transfer device. If fair use is expanded to all non-commercial fair use, they would be able to focus on a more realistic target (commercial infringers, as opposed to everyone), and also would not be the biggest bunch of assholes on the internet. They are making a lot of enemies now-- enemies with long memories.
I realize that child soldiers in Africa is a much more dire problem than copyright persecution of citizens on the internet, in the short term. But if we can't have reasonably free use of information on our information machines, in the long run we may not be able to talk about child soldiers in Africa. And when you can't talk about a problem honestly, you have no hope of fixing it at all. And we have plenty of problems that need fixing.
So we need to stop these people from this vile behavior of using the legal system to ruin people's lives for trading information.
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