There is a direction: we are alive and they are not. Unless they were wiped out by a freak event, it means we're genetically "better". And the line would be that preventing mammoths from interbreeding with elephants is not an ethical issue of the same caliber.

Intellectual Property is a legally meaningless term which encompasses copyrights, patents, trademark law, and trade secret law. If you object to the words themselves being used as a term to group these items together, you are free to try to introduce a new phrase into common usage, but until then I don't know of another phrase which has the same meaning and I don't really feel like typing out "copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secret law" every time I want to refer to them as a group.

> Millenarian exhortations of the revolution to come are millenarian. But yes, I'm sure the people will rise up and violently defend the rights of a Hong Kong server farm operator to sell you other people's movies, as long as they lies they're told are sufficient to the purpose.

Who said anything about violent? You seem to be doing some weird projection or something here. I'm talking about reversing the trend of adjusting laws constantly to benefit media conglomerates. It serves no purpose for society and and it is getting insane. 17+17 years for copyright is fine, this "forever" crap is partially what is leading to the universal lack of respect for copyrights.

Intent is what needs to be proven, and all we have so far are accusations (most of which involve how much money was made rather than how and with what intent). I'm reserving judgement on this until facts come out but it certainly sounds ANY network community involving user contributed content would fall under the same axe.

I'm not convinced the way we are handling copyright these days is beneficial to society at all, I suspect a backlash is coming.

How was their adherence to DMCA a sham? They adhered to it.

> you can only claim safe harbor from DMCA if and only if you do not profit from the sharing. The fact that they were able to profit from infringing content, despite abiding by the letter of the DMCA, indicates the fundamental weakness of the DMCA enforcement provisions.

Please tell me how this is in any way different from youtube?

> They made money, shitloads of money, literally a small studio's annual profit worth of money, off of other people's stuff, period.

Please tell me how this is in any way different from youtube?

Now you are getting it. The media conglomerates have long been going after the ability to take down websites regardless of copyright content (they took down megaupload's youtube video despite not having any copyright claim on it, they have that agreement with google and want it elsewhere).

You are talking about popular music, sure. But because it isn't on MTV doesn't mean it isn't happening.

> most lively and active period in music was in between 1700-1850.

I don't disagree with most of your post, but where I come from we call THAT an opinion.

> Hollywood have been waging a war on copyright infringement, not technology.

Hollywood has been waging an ill advised war on any technology that could have copyright infringement implications (which is a decent percentage). Remember the VCR? I was going to be to the movie industry what the boston strangler was to woman. (remember how destructive VCRs were to Hollywood? It barely survived)
This is simply a continuation of the kind of ignorant resistance to technology that would actually be beneficial to the large media conglomerates if they were capable of adapting and innovating instead of just chucking money at Congress to keep extending copyright.

> Google's beef with SOPA is that they don't want to constantly police their own search results and be held responsible for user generated content.

I'm sure it also had something to do with the other myriad of technically unrealistic provisions around DNS and such, but yes.

> If there was a way to magically get rid of copyright infringement violations without putting extra burden on Google or other Internet start ups, then both Hollywood and Google would support it. There is some common ground on the issue, and compromises can be made to make sure both industries can thrive.

So when do we see that start happening instead of the constant bribery of elected officials to enact draconian laws they don't understand, extend copyright to save a stupid mouse from entering public domain, and manipulating international treaties to stack copyright law and technology regulations in their favor?

Megaupload (like Youtube) also responded to any DMCA takedown notices and was used by plenty of legitimate services as well. Bad example.