Respect Authority

Because suing 13-year-old girls for their pirated N*Sync collections wasn’t quite vicious enough, the RIAA and MPAA backed PRO-IP Act was signed into law yesterday by… you guessed it, President George “My Approval Rating Can Only Go Up With This One… Or, You Know, It Won’t” Bush.

The law, largely regarded as “bullshit” by everyone who isn’t an industry fat cat, will toughen penalties for movie and music piracy, along with other copyright violations, to an extremely absurd degree. This is the Japanese game show of laws — it’s that fucking crazy.

The law would allow the government to seize all the computers and MP3 players in a person’s house if they were found to be in possession of just one pirated song or movie. You might have only had an illegal copy of Metallica’s new album because your friend emailed it to you and you forgot to remove it from your iTunes library after immediately realizing it was utter garbage, but if caught, you’ll never see your iTunes library again. And really, it seems like the only people in this situation who actually deserve to be punished are Metallica — I’d like the government to take their computers away… so they can’t record any more music on them.

Additionally, the PRO-IP Act will create an “intellectual property czar,” who has yet to be named, but you know, I have this strange hunch that whoever gets this title is going to be a world-class dick. Not to mention, for all the (retarded) concerns about America’s move towards socialism, nobody’s too bothered by imperialism? Or did somebody just manage to miss the fact that we’re signing bills into law that call for the creation of czars? Russia of all fucking places doesn’t even have czars anymore. Imagine answering a knock on your door only to be greeted by this…

IP Czar: Hi, I’m the Intellectual Property Czar. You can kiss my ring… it has the copyright symbol engraved in solid 24k gold. Yeah, also… I heard you have a couple computers. I’ll take those.

Tom Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is either completely oblivious or completely a liar, and said about the controversial law, “By becoming law, the PRO-IP Act sends the message to IP criminals everywhere that the U.S. will go the extra mile to protect American innovation,” yeah, but mostly the American music and movie industries that are, in fact, nearly devoid of any innovation at all. Same thing, really.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, counterfeiting and piracy costs the United States nearly $250 billion annually. And bailing out irresponsible corporations costs a mere $700 billion by comparison. Where’s our Wall Street Czar? Where’s our Subprime Lending Oligarch? And most importantly, where have all the cowboys gone?

[Reuters]