Companies have every right to crack down on copyright infringement.
This is a victory against a piece of legislation that was overreaching, potentially harmful to entirely innocent parties, and could have caused censorship across the internet.
A lot of people (mostly reddit users) seem to think that there is now some automatic right to download shit for free whenever you want, and we should be protected by law to be able to do this. That's just greedy entitlement. And that's not what this is about. Everyone deserves to be paid for their work, whether it's you, me or a corporation (which often employs people like you and me anyway). The point in this case, is that authorities went too far down the road of infringement of people's genuine rights in trying to protect corporate profits.
I'm sure there will be those who disagree, but taking other people's work without their permission isn't morally justifiable whichever way you try to spin it. Regardless of who made it. And that's not what we should be fighting for. This is not, and should not be a "victory for piracy". It's about our freedom as individuals not to be treated like de facto criminals by our own governments.
It's easy to rant for or against this. On a flipside:
1. Copyright is deeply broken. It currently extends well beyond any reasonable interpretation of it's original purpose.
2. You can't enter a medium and regulate it so you can do business. The standard rules and metaphors of IP don't apply as well to digital distribution. The easiest way to prevent copyrighted work from being distributed is to not digitize it. Very few books and comics were being illegally downloaded before they started epubing them. But you can't pretend you have the right to a law on medium with a structure counter to that law.
3. "Everyone deserves to be paid for their work" is false. Everyone who does work, which can be sold in the current market, given the current realities of the world, and who price and distribute their product properly should be paid for their work. If I go clean up a public park, I have no right to charge admission. If I build a statue in a public space, I can't charge people to look at it, even if they come from far away to see it.
Everyone deserves to get a part of any profit derived from their work, is a more correct statement.
This is a victory against a piece of legislation that was overreaching, potentially harmful to entirely innocent parties, and could have caused censorship across the internet. A lot of people (mostly reddit users) seem to think that there is now some automatic right to download shit for free whenever you want, and we should be protected by law to be able to do this. That's just greedy entitlement. And that's not what this is about. Everyone deserves to be paid for their work, whether it's you, me or a corporation (which often employs people like you and me anyway). The point in this case, is that authorities went too far down the road of infringement of people's genuine rights in trying to protect corporate profits.
I'm sure there will be those who disagree, but taking other people's work without their permission isn't morally justifiable whichever way you try to spin it. Regardless of who made it. And that's not what we should be fighting for. This is not, and should not be a "victory for piracy". It's about our freedom as individuals not to be treated like de facto criminals by our own governments.