The question proposed is "Has any creative work failed because of piracy?" The real question is "why has piracy become acceptable?" I Think we can answer this in 2 parts. 1) Congress has made copyright so long that it is essentially "forever" in terms of relevance. This also has an effect of stifling new work that may make use of, or resemble, something else released since it will never become public domain in our lives. 2) Because the respective industries have taken great pains to lock out any works they do not own, they have no reason to produce anything but music, movies etc. that meets the lowest common denominator since it is cheaper to market a few groups or movies than thousands. The book publishers still thrive despite thousands of choices and a vast array of independent publishers. Sure there are some blockbusters and duds, but they still make money, and would without the incredibly long copyright period. This policy of force feeding media and eternal copyright has made the whole idea a joke. Couple that with the "creative accounting" where the artists don't get paid and no one respects the copyright law. Why should they? The only ones who make money seem to be the ones intent upon curtailing our choices and creativity.

"Except, the burden of proof is not on the skeptics" Actually that is completely wrong. A theory has been proposed that supposedly endangers us all. Evidence is presented. If they are wrong, there is little damage in implementing the solutions provided, and may even ultimately save us money. However, failing to act could be disasterous. "Hey Harry, I think letting the collant run out of the Reactor chamber would be bad" "Oh Geoge, you're just being an alarmist. Can you prove it is disasterous every single time?" The problem is that you can only disprove the sceptics by letting it happen, and by then it is too late. Even if the global temperature rise IS natural, and by some freak of nature, all of the pollution and CO2 we spew out has nothing to do with the excelleration, a rise in temperature is bad for us. This is simple logic. So, even IF all of these scientists are wrong, we still need to do something.

If people become too much of a jerk, start telling their manager that you can't keep going over there to fix things "they" broke. Doesn't matter if they did. If managers think their employees are loosing time becasue they are mucking with their computer, they tend to get upset. It used to work well for me when I was doing helpdesk many years ago. I was treated like crap by the engineers until I started bring ing their managers into the process. Once the manager knew the person was costing the company money, things changed.

As a government agency, I didn't think they could copyright or patent things because it is done with taxpayer money.

That's great as long as there are consequences for reporting lies, and halve-truths. The problem has become that no one even gets a hand slapped when they don't research, or even make up, stories and report lies or rumors. You want to use the public airwaves? Sure, but you can't lie to the people while doing it. Combine this with government pressuring reports on what they can and can't report and we have fascism.

Just because you are a conservative, doesn't mean you are a neo-con. The Fox is biased, NOT towards liberals, but towards the neo-con agenda. I am a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal. You would think I would love Fox for the fiscal side. However, the recent and administration and Fox news are NOT conservatives. They have spent money, hand-over-fist for pork, wars and personal gain. This is not what a conservative does.

The problem with that is that the new is supposed to be a check in this system of checks and balances. That is a major reason for the freedom of the press. They are supposed to be able to investigate and criticize the government. If you bring in "news for ratings" you break the balance. The news is supposed to report...well, the news. Biases will happen, but gross, conscious biases prevent people from getting the facts. The fact that many news organizations wrote positive articles about Obama can be directly abtributed to his charisma and positive message. What I found appalling is the lack of research and fact finding the news has been doing on either side. They should have been digging deep and offering information without an agenda. Fox on the other hand was inventing stories with and obvious bias. They had nothing to back up many of the stories, but headlined them anyway. This is just irresponsible, and if someone were doing it in the liberal direction, it would be just as bad. Even if all news organizations were unbiased, you have to realize that the news will not always be in the direction you like. Putting the number of article for one candidate against the number of the other one without understanding the other factors is simply bad science and is only hurting us as a nation. Remember that the decrease in pirates is the reason for global warming... http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/

So, you are saying we should have elected someone else and let these issues get worse? If you can't fix it all, and instantly, we might as well give up. Many of us know reality and know the first part of getting a plan together is getting the proper people. No, these types of issues will take some time. IT is easier to mess everything up than to fix it. So, are you going to be part of the problem or the solution?