You Are Not Reading This

Consider this blog blacked out today in support of people against Hollywood and the music industry and the ridiculous censorship laws they're promoting. (To simplify this law for the cephalically-challenged, it goes thus: if a website posts a link to another website that has even one link to a copyright-violating file, then the first website is considered as guilty as the second, and the whole site can technically be ordered to shut down. Or so I understand it. Trust me, it would be bad.)

Just pretend you're not reading this and the whole page is blacked out (I'd do it if I knew how!)

It's amazing how long this bickering has been going on between the aforementioned Hollywood and music companies and the Internet. Ever since Napster closed its doors, oh, around 16 years ago?

Of course, back then there was no YouTube and practically no streaming video at all, so Hollywood at least kept its trap shut. But now they come bleating and whimpering like whipped puppies to Big Daddy to make the kids on the block stop laughing at them from across the street every time they go to school.

Clockwise from top left: Cary Sherman, Chairman & CEO, RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America); Mitch Glazier, Senior Executive Vice President, RIAA; Christopher J. Dodd, MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America); Jeff Bewkes, CEO, Time Warner; Howard Stringer, CEO, Sony Entertainment, Roger Faxon, CEO, EMI 

Of course, if Hollywood stopped vomiting forth the endless stream of drivel they call "Motion Pictures," reduced the number of elephant-turd-slash-movies from 1,000 a year to just, say, TWO that are worth watching, and the music industry stopped churning out the buzzing drone of mindless noise they produce with such profligacy and instead give us three or four products that actually qualify for the term "music," both at reasonable prices, well, kids nowadays wouldn't feel so much the urge to borrow them only to discard them in disgust at a later date.

So please consider this page blacked out, oh, and fellow Canadians, don't sit there smugly thinking "Serves them Yanks right!" as, as we all know, Canada always follows the US, lapdog fashion no matter what they do.