Every time you download a song

When all the entire music piracy began one of the saying that sprung up over the internet was this:



Seems the ramification has changed dramatically. The above website was posted at a website rnbxclusive.com. Now if you download a song you could face up to 10 years in prison. Now that's some serious time. As well you could pay the state a boatload of money, so much that can't begin to calculate the amount.

Someone once said that the punishment society metes out reflects the morals of that society. The thought being the crimes that are considered particularly heinous have a longer prison sentence or even capital punishment. This is why across the board nations declare the great punishment for murder, because we declare that all human life is valuable and must be protected by putting a murdered away for either life, a very long time or in some nations, death.

One wonders what this says about modern British society when downloading music illegally carries a great jail term then rape. Of course its also longer then the average manslaughter prison sentence.

So society, through its government has spoken and it views the greatest crime in their society as that of downloading music, movies and any culture. It views the protection of culture as more important then the lives of its citizenry. Now how is that for a screwed up sense of importance. Not only that but the fact the website in question was seized by the `Serious Organized Crime Organization` indicates the importance placed on protecting the sanctity of music. You can`t let all those nasty people pirating culture. That would be simply wrong.

It should be pointed out that SOCA has decided to throttle back on the threats and now this is what greets you when you go to the above mentioned site:

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All this energy, enforcement and time spent going after the real criminals in society, those music pirates. Many believe this is a direct result of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, that spends most of its time going after those people who download the latest Lady Gaga track.

Then again, never underestimate the power of the Cultural Mafia. They have a lot of money and influence because of the money and they don't mind buying a few politicians along the way. The reason for their concern over piracy is that when you download a song you are destroying opportunities and taking the livelihood from musicians. Not only musicians, but all those involved in the music industry, the studio players, the engineers, producers, sound managers, even those poor people in the CD factories stamping out those shiny plastic discs for $1.00 a week. They all suffer because YOU downloaded a song.

This also holds true when you download a movie, or TV show illegally.

Then we have the words of Alex Cox, the director of Repo Man:

It’s so corrupt. Now they want to have longer copyright periods because they say the young artists are relying on this money. The young artists never see any money because they sign away that money to big media corporations, like Universal and Viacom.”

“We, the artists, lose all of our rights to these massive corporations, who then come down heavy on these kids for downloading films and music that we never see a penny from.”

“It’s complete bullshit. I want to encourage your audience to go and pirate a bunch of my stuff right away.

The rights don't belong to the creators of culture, they belong to the corrupter's of culture. Big Media owns the rights and they want to own all the money that comes from those rights. The history of recorded music long demonstrates the abuse of musicians by the recording labels and it continues to this day.

However none of this plays a part in the concerns of government or the ratifiers of ACTA. The treaty has this to say about piracy:

To protect electronic rights management information,16 each Party shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against any person knowingly performing without authority any of the following acts knowing, or with respect to remedies, having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of any copyright or related rights:to remove or alter any electronic rights management information;
(b) to distribute, import for distribution, broadcast, communicate, or make
available to the public copies of works, performances, or phonograms,
knowing that electronic rights management information has been
removed or altered without authority.
8. In providing adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies pursuant to

It's all the make the world safer for MegaCulture conglomerates. Which is far more important then say protect people from murderers or rapist.