Just amuses me, the acronym they so desperately shoehorned together, is PROTECT really much better than it being the FMT ruling or whatever?
As is, it's mainly to protect people from the boogeyman, or corporations from some ethereal threat that's far bigger looking than it actually is.
I also like the idea that it's to 'protect from threats to economic creativity' - are pirates not being creative economically, by getting content for free via alternative means? I'm not saying it's legal, but it's a creative way of doing it. Probably not the best wording.
Still, at least they're trying to update the laws, instead of bending old ones to fit crimes that don't fit any more. To me, if someone finds a way of doing bad things that the law doesn't condemn, the law needs to change, we can't just criminalise people because of a generalised 'bad person' feeling.
Unfortunately, it seems every step they make in trying to combat piracy has wide sweeping repercussions on basic internet freedoms, and anything that goes thru is just going to push sites out of the US and Europe and into less regulatory countries, taking the profits and taxes with it. As ever, if you can't punish the pirates without screwing over the innocent customers, it's probably not worth doing.
As an example, the recent case of trying to criminalise drawings of naked children, the case being that it was still child pornography even if was fictional children. So are the cherubs in old artistic masterpieces now the work of a deviant paedophile? It's very easy to carefully word something to get backing from the masses, but art should not be restrained except for very good reasons, and we already have rules about obscenity. In the same way, our freedoms should not be walked all over, because some people use those freedoms in a bad way.
