William-CL wrote:
Sopa and this Case are a little different though. In this case it's blatenly obvious that they were profiting on copyrighted material. Sopa would have people that use that material for fun be removed. A lot of the people that bash Sopa don't do it for the Copyright portion of it, it's the fact that it's not limited to copyright protection. In the case of Megaupload, it's purely copyright issues that got it removed. So yea I'm glad copyright profiteering was shutdown in this case, but sopa is still FAR from that answer to doing this more in the future.
Now if Megaupload wasn't profiting from the material they posted, I would be a little pissed off about it. Look at all the youtube videos that have music in them. Every one of them would be a separate case of a felony with Sopa. Each gamer would need explicit permission from a copyright holder to upload footage of gameplay to be completely protected from Sopa given it's specific wording.
Youtube already does ban videos based on copyright infringement. I can name countless episodes of Adventure Time that I have seen be removed by the youtube administrators due to copyright infringement and the youtube accounts uploading them weren't making profit off of it. If the owner of said material doesn't want their information being displayed, be it for either profit or no profit reason, than they should have the right to control who has access to their material. I mean they created it, they should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it.
I hate your use of the word 'fun'. If someone downloads Photoshop, for example just to use it for 'fun' they should still be denied access to it. If you want to use the program, a program that people worked long and hard on, than you should just buy it. Can't afford it? Save up and buy it. Chances are if you can afford a computer capable of decent level of graphics editing, a stable internet connection to download it, a house to support off of these things etc than chances are you can save for a few months and buy the dam thing. Under the legal age to work? Do some chores around the house, save up all your pocket money and get a student edition. My example is completely irrelevant, but I could see it being brought up in conversation so I thought I'd cover it now.
"Fun" is not a justification for copyright infringement, it's so easily corruptible and not a valid reason to misuse a designer/artists material. "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to display your news articles on my news website for profit reasons. No, no, I simply put them there for fun, it was fun, it makes people have fun."
