There can be no doubt that Americans are already living in a corporate-controlled state. Sure, elections are held, but it's nigh on impossible to get elected to high office (U.S. House, Senate, President) without enormous political "contributions" from corporate coffers. How many times have we heard the old trope about "protecting American businesses" from our elected officials? Indeed, they've said it so many times that people actually *believe* businesses need protection rather than the other way 'round. However you feel about the healthcare debate, or the TARP bail-outs (too big to fail? WTF!?!), or no-bid defense contracts, etc, one thing should be eminently clear to those on all sides: these days, it is impossible to tell where the government ends and the corporate board room begins.

I couldn't agree more. But this would mean game studios would have to start hiring people with *gasp* liberal arts degrees! In all seriousness, and to take your point further, three-dimensional MMOs offer greater artistic opportunities and pose greater challenges than your run-of-the-mill videogame. These worlds have the capacity to incorporate much of the ingenuity and creativity of the human experience - from art to music to the written word - but always manage to fall woefully short of the mark. I think the reason for this is fairly simple: games like this are massively expensive and have to recoup [or demonstrate the possibility to recoup] significant capital outlay in a relatively short period of time. It's not ars gratia artis. Would a game which incorporated the theatrical devices of Shakespeare, the rich descriptiveness of Henry James, and the subtleties of games like Go or Bridge into a real-time 3D environment be better [read: more engaging and less prone to bots/spammers] than WoW or its ilk? Probably. Would it sell? I doubt it, unless it offered something for those less attuned to subtlety and artifice.

According to Congress, Copyright Law is the most important set of laws ever written. I say this purely from a damages standpoint: for antitrust violations, patent infringement, securities fraud, toxic torts, and other socially detrimental acts for which civil remedies are provided, often the greatest measure of damages afforded by law is trebled (3x actual damages). With copyrights, however, that number can be 150,000x actual damages. Undedr the methods proposed in the PRO IP Act, someone caught with an iPod full of pirated songs (30,000 songs, let's say) can face a maximum penalty of ~$4.5 BILLION in statutory damages. Somehow, this seems a little ridiculous--to put it in perspective, most record companies average less than ~$700 million in sales. So the "theft" mentioned above is valued at more than 3x TOTAL Revenues for some companies! And in patent infringement or antitrust cases, the injured party has to PROVE damages. Not so in the case of copyright - it's strict liability. My personal feeling on this is that Congress should go back to the drawing board--i.e., the Constitution--and limit copyright protection to the "Authors" mentioned in the text of Article I. Musicians, movie studios, and more importantly, publishing clearinghouses != authors as the term was used in 1787, and so should not get the same protection granted to AUTHORS. But this is what happens in any system where elected officials rely on private money to campaign for office--only the wealthiest and most powerful interests will receive representation, no matter how invidious or destructive their goals may be.