Aw, News Corp. You do love you some hyperbole and vilification, don'cha?
Look, I'm not going to deny that piracy is a real problem. But in terms of societal damage, I have to wonder how it compares to, say, a powerful media company becoming the de facto propaganda arm of one political wing, misinforming millions of people and promoting a culture of fear. Or a consortium of media companies colluding to minimize creator rights and royalties, extend copyright periods until they stretch long past the authors' lifespans, and co-author draconian and privacy-invading laws to enforce their perceived "rights" to profit from those works- even as doing so stifles innovation and protects dying market models at the cost of newer, more effective ones.
In a digital world, it's insanity that using a thirty-year-old piece of music in a video from which the creator derives no profit exposes the creator to legal danger. Or that a company like Microsoft can still forbid use or reverse engineering of operating systems that it no longer sells or supports. And that such "crimes" are stacked in the same pile with, say, distributing movies that haven't even reached their theatrical release date?
We need reform of our intellectual property laws, but it needs to go both ways, both protecting creators and liberating media usage that most reasonable people would recognize as fair use. And no way in hell can we let blowhards like Williams set the agenda or define the conversation.