Based on? Specifically.

The proposed rulemaking will do no such thing. It explicitly leaves hobbyists alone, as mandated by congress. It only applies to commercial users. People using their 3-pound quadcopter to get some YouTube video of the fire near their house aren't the people that the FAA's new rules will impact.

Is everyone who drives a car past your property also a nosy fucking asshole? What information do you have that the people flying those aircraft gave a rats ass about your property or you or your activities? Please be specific.

Some people fly remote control aircraft just for the fun of flying - just like people who fly hot air balloons, ultralights, hang gliders, parachutes, and more. To say nothing of the Cessnas and Beechcraft and other machines that have probably flown over your property many time over the years. Either you need to relax a bit and realize that You're Not That Interesting ... or you need to get a LOT more worked up and paranoid than you already are, because there are probably people near you - RIGHT NOW! - holding cameras that can remotely send pictures of what you're doing to cloud storage that's not completely secure from government intrusion and Chinese hacking. You are worried about all the people around you all day, who could be spying on you with their smartphones, right? No? I see.

And what's the most common counter-argument? That the moment an artist creates something, it's part of the shared culture and the artist has zero claim over its use. Which is worse - a system that allows someone who spends a lifetime creating something of value to still have control over that as part of the career and estate that she's built ... or a system where essentially every creative professional is chased out of that line of work and into flipping burgers because millions of idiots feel entitled to free entertainment from their music, prose, and film slaves?

Right. That's a false dichotomy. But it has to err on the side of defending the rights of the people who actually create things, not the leeches who want to rip things off in the name of free entertainment.

Well, all you have to do is come up with an enbiggened disincentivicationism to counterproduce the linguinistical resultifacts that meet your desirenessifity.

It's really not that complicated. When an artist creates something, and offers it to the market on certain terms, people who take it anyway without actually honoring those terms are ripping it off. It's as simple as that. If you don't like the terms under which someone's creative work is being offered, just walk away. If you say instead, "That's nice, Mr. Filmmaker/Recording Artist/Author, I really admire your creativity and appreciate the thousands of hours you've put into creating the entertainment I want ... but I don't respect you enough to agree to your terms, so I'm just going to take what I want and screw you... but please, keep making more of what I like!" ... then you know exactly who is doing the ripping off.

Pretending you can't get that is you being completely disingenuous, and you know it.

Are you talking about actual fraud and breech of contract? If so, artists have all sorts of recourse to recover not only something that's been fraudulently taken from them, but to recover punitive damages, as well.

Or are you talking about artists who sign an ill-considered contract because they've chosen poorly in their selection of business partners, and couldn't be bothered to get some expert help to look over the contract? You're not being "ripped off" when you choose to enter into an agreement.

For the same reason that you get it, when it comes to your own works.

A lot of franchise-oriented work these days takes longer than 14 years to even wrap up, as a series/format. There's no reason that someone deciding to risk tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and untold thousands of man-hours on a project that they hope will launch another Potter/Star Wars/Trek/Marvel/Whatever franchise wouldn't be thinking in terms of the work still paying back that risk for fifteen, or twenty years. And why shouldn't they? Playing long ball with creative franchises is perfectly reasonable, if you can get your investors to look at it that way, too.

Because if the breathless crap being fretted about were actually to come to pass, it would be a huge pain in the ass to everyone who actually creates things for a living.

No. If you don't have the work registered, you can only go for the injunction, and for your customary rates/invoicing on the work in question. What having the work registered does is allow you to take the infringement case to federal court, and to seek punitive damages.

Yeah, it sucks to get hated for encouraging clear communication in public, doesn't it? Probably not as much as it sucks to be you, when that's all you've got, above. What a shallow, pathetic existence. But hey, if hating someone is your only outlet, and that's the limit to your ability to express yourself, I guess it's good to know your limits.

But it IS your responsibility to not rip people off, or to tolerate other people doing so. Especially if you personally like the output of artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and others who - without copyrights on their creations - wouldn't bother to create what you like.

So what you're saying is that you, just like the headline writer, don't actually understand what the word means.

No, I complained that the word was used incorrectly, and that an editor chose to do so in a headline - the most visible place here in which to do so.

Here's the primary definition of Aggravate:

People with a working vocabulary have been making the distinction between an irritation and an aggravated irritation for a long time. As in, "The child scratched at the irritating wound, which aggravated the injury."

The only way in which it makes sense to use "aggravating" in the context of a certification test (as in the OP), is to say something like, "He was in a bad mood from his morning car accident, and the annoyance of having to take a pointless certification test aggravated his already foul disposition."

The only person unfamiliar with this long-standing use and construction is you. Paid editors running headlines on widely read web sites, though, should be ahead of you on this - and they weren't in this case. Simple as that.

Which is exactly why referendum votes are usually such a terrible idea. Because most people lack the information and critical thinking skills to vote wisely. The same people you think would sweep away copyright laws would then be wondering why nobody is making them any movies beyond the generally crappy garage-level indie dreck that can scrape up some family and gofundme me cash. They'd wonder why their favorite musicians would be charging $400 for a concert ticket, and no longer laboring to make complex recordings that involve months of work, dozens of studio musicians and the like. They'd wonder why their favorite authors would stop writing books that involve the investment of years of their lives ... because they're too busy trying to pay their bills doing paid short story readings at Barnes & Noble. Of course B&N would be out of business, so that wouldn't actually happen.

"Paid for the law?" The concept has been in place since the founding of the country, because the people who chartered the nation recognized the essential role that copyrights play in protecting a vital area of work. Because most voters couldn't even tell you what the Bill of Rights is, don't lecture about how meaningful a simple referendum would be, in this regard.