There is a proposal to raise jail times for web piracy from two to ten years in the UK.
Jail time for web piracy could rise from 2 to 10 years
https://t.co/exdGbes0AJ #ukpoli— min reyes (@Min_Reyes) April 25, 2016
The key phrase in the above piece is “…other serious offenses, including rape and rioting.”
So, the writer, Matt Burgess, is saying web piracy is a serious offense, akin to rape.
Do not pretend a professional writer (and his editor) don’t know what they’re doing. It leaped out at me immediately. It appears to condemn, but the language normalizes.
Though this line is buried in the text, it is the pull quote used on twitter.
Our media is, overall, a detriment to society. I mean this quite seriously.
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CH
Angry Twitter mob to denounce Burgess for trivializing rape in 3…2…1…never.
Tom
Rape is never treated seriously in the US. If convicted, a Rapist faces a max of 7 years if that. Non-violent use of crack gets a person 20 years.
Justice is ass backwards in the West and has been for decades if not longer.
Erin Harris
“Rape and rioting” struck me harder than “other” and “rape”. Clearly, no abuse of copyright even approaches rape in criminality, but neither does rioting — and yet we’re supposed to pair those two up without a moment’s thought, perhaps on the strength of alliteration. WTF?
highrpm
corporate media are rapists — literally with all the sexual themeology they package with much of their crap products to boost sales revenues, and figuratively for taking advantage of us dummies who slop at their troughs by rigidly setting the framework and context of the commentariate reporting they do.
highrpm
yea, i likely suffer some degree of aspergers/ autism. is there any collective mind that does not go ape shit on “belongers” who choose to no longer “belong”? (e.g. i’m with ignorantguru who laments the big corporates google & co. finally wresting control of linux from the open-source freebie developer community. (and the reddit commenters label iguru as exhibiting aspergers with his anti-corporate paranoid rants. yet there’s appears lots of truth in those rants.))
reslez
“We are now proposing changes that include increasing the maximum sentence, but at the same time addressing concerns about the scope of the offence,” said Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe.
I’m just going to sit here a mo and enjoy that amazing, amazing name. Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe. Wow. If this isn’t a pre-revolutionary document I don’t know what is.
The lady continues: “There are already a range of safeguards in place which would limit the risk of a very low level infringer being subjected to a high penalty in practice,” and “criminal offences should not apply to low level infringement”. The weasel words dripping from this noblewoman’s mouth reek as much as this policy does. Arbitrary rules enforced at random, that’s basically how one infantilizes a population of prisoners (and citizens).
In the US, high maximum penalties are used to browbeat the innocent into accepting rotten plea bargains. Risk-free for the prosecutors. Only the target pays the price. And taxpayers, who have to foot the bill for keeping these people in prison. And families, who lose a loved one. And society, which loses a productive citizen. All to guarantee the profits of an industry of propagandists.
And then there’s the just plain gross comparison of copyright infringement with rape, where an actual human being suffers actual harm, as opposed to copyright infringement which from a Confucian point of view has the virtue of spreading knowledge — but Ian already mentioned most of that. I guess if you’re a sociopath it’s difficult to tell the difference. David Graeber’s piece in the Baffler springs to mind. The basis of the British economy is the “historical defeat and humiliation” of the working class. “[I]t is precisely the global appeal of the English class system, up to and including the contemptuous sneer of the Oxbridge graduates in Parliament chuckling over the impending removal of housing benefits” that keeps the British economy afloat. And here it is again.
hangtheelite
And all you morons just accept it and take it. Nothing will change without elite necks in nooses, and swift hard kicks to the stool.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Once violence gets started, it has a nasty habit of getting out of the control of the original instigators.
How does HTE know it won’t eventually be his neck in the noose?
Assuming that he’s even sincere, of course. After all, there’s that bitterly learned wisdom of the Sixties radicals: “The first guy who suggests violence is always the undercover cop.”