More media nonsense

The latest stinking heap of lies and nonsense spewed out by the media to catch my ire is right here. It's a typically overblown, self-congratulatory article written with a strong pro-RIAA/MPAA (or, as I like to call them, the Music And Film Industry Associations of America, or MAFIAA) stance.

The gist of the article is that this clown-shoes moron Florida Representative, who should fail to win reelection for proposing such a scandalously stupid waste of taxpayer money as this, has proposed a law by which universities would be required to take funds provided to them by the government for, y'know, teaching students, and instead use them to track down and punish students who download music and movies illegally. (Run-on sentence!)

Yes. He thinks the money that universities use now to pay for insignificant things like professors, computer labs, and dorms should instead be used to track down broke 19-year-olds downloading Jay-Z albums. This is easily the most powerfully, profoundly stupid thing I've heard in recent memory...but it's not just stupid. The article contains some contradictory statements, raising this to the level of -- dare I say it? -- propaganda. Let's take a look.

Representative Tardface says: "It's just plain wrong to steal billions of dollars in intellectual property from hardworking people whose jobs hang in the balance."

Okay, billions of dollars. Never mind that what he's proposing would also take billions of dollars away from hardworking people whose jobs hang in the balance. Oh, but what's this, from further down in the article?

The problem of campus piracy is a serious one, costing the motion picture and record industries more than $20 million a year. The Motion Picture Assn. of America (MPAA), the lobbying arm of the major Hollywood studios, estimates that campus piracy accounts for 44 percent of the problem in the U.S.

...Wha? So the MAFIAA loses $20M a year to piracy on college campuses, and that total is 44 percent of the total piracy problem in the US? Let's do a little math...that means they lose, oh, approximately $45 million in the US every year to piracy. Okay. Not sure how they come up with that, since elsewhere, I've seen the RIAA claim that they are entitled to $150,000 damages for each song someone downloads, but that's another post. So $45M a year between the music and movie industries. BUT WAIT! I thought Rep. Idiot McMoron claimed that college campuses are responsible for billions of dollars of damages! He wouldn't be resorting to hyperbole just to make the problem sound worse than it is, would he? Would the MAFIAA really endorse such flagrant lies?

And let's take a look at what, exactly, this law proposes for fighting on-campus piracy: "Under Keller's legislation universities could tap the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) Program under the Department of Education to fund 'innovative on-campus, anti-piracy pilot programs designed to reduce digital piracy.'"

Hmmm, so instead of using this important funding to help people improve themselves through education, it would instead be used to fund further propaganda. I must have missed the day on which all universities everywhere decided that their mission was no longer to educate people, and that it was in fact to become enforcement agencies for large, heartless corporate entitities.

I'm sure that these "anti-piracy pilot programs" will be worth every single penny. Indeed, from my recollections of college life, if there's one thing you can count on college students to do, it's to respect the teachings and recommendations of their government, who, I'm sure, only have the students' best interests in mind! That's a group of people who just loves authority, and submitting to whatever rules they come up with!

Well done, Representative Stupid Turdbag! Anyone with such a short-sighted, callous ability to have his or her opinions so utterly skewed should be kept away from the rest of us. Vote against this idiot in '08, Florida.