Robin Hood maybe legend, but the American Revolution isn't. Americans took arms against the British and their legal policies in the colonies that the British financed and owned because to the Americans those policies were intolerable and morally wrong.
No matter how the established government and corporations of that time wanted the American colonies to go on paying extra taxes and not having representation present for the process of lawmaking. No matter that it was right and legal for those British to impose additional taxes against American Companies and not British, it was still repugnant to the colonists. They fought and died to resist it. To me that seems pretty heroic.
Today the corporations and government are working to protect their profits, not their livelihoods, these people profit off the works of others. It is easy to go from patron to exploiter in such a situation.
The corporations are profiting from an older technology to distribute works of artists that do not share in those profits. There is no profit sharing plan here. The artists are paid fundamentally differently from the corporation with whom they have a contract. The newer technology does not threaten the profits of the artists so much as the profitability of the corporations that have the artists under contract. The artists can use any means of distribution as they are the creators. The corporations only profit if the distribution is through the mediums they own and manipulate to their corporate advantage. It is because the corporation owns the means of distribution that the artist signs a contract with a corporation in the first place. The government sees that the people with the most money (corporations) are feeling threatened (all that money buys a lot of lawyers to bring this to the government's attention) the government then acts to 'protect their richest supporters' by passing laws unfair to the users of the newer technology. The people are upset by it even though it is the law of the land. People then break the law. Is the law right, or are the people right?
Americans once decided that the people were righter than the law, and fought and died for people's rights. That is why the second amendment to The Constitution of the United States of America is there. And that is why so many new laws are eroding the fourth amendment too. Since when did the people that own a distribution medium have more rights than the people that actually create the thoughts being distributed?
Robin Hood may be legend, but Americans fought and died against unjust tyranny for real, just like in the legends, and for much the same reasons.
Who's side are you really on?
