They closed MU. The FBI closed it and arrested the owners for piracy. The company operated worldwide, but its owners worked in places like Hong Kong and New Zealand.

Do I need to say it? DO I? We kind of had the piracy discussion some... time ago (months? years?), but. Fuck you, USA. I could say a lot of things, but I'm childishly sore, the kind of sore of someone who had their pretty things taken away, and I feel kinda vindictive. Just going to say that it SO doesn't go both ways. In the matter of things big companies in the US can do, and things everyone else can do.

Also? Don't come butthurt at me? I have had in this journal lately some shitty comments going on about how REALLY some thing or another is also happening and it shows some experience isn't really privileged, and WHY don't you care about this, and... I don't want to hear it. I'm going to ban you if you come with shit like that to me. I'm sore.

(Yes, I can like my pretty things, and I can't have them like you people can thanks to some of the shit YOU -I mean, YOUR GOVERNMENT- and your companies put around here, and DID around here. So be quiet.)

I don't know if I already linked it some time ago, but if you really, really need to say something? Please, read this first: Media Piracy in Emerging Economies.

color_blue is awesome and has an awesome post:

this is not a post about yoga! And really, it isn't (or not only, at least).

It's what so many people, all over the world, have been saying for so long. The current system of intellectual property rights, embedded in the racist classist hegemonic individualist capitalist Western ownership system that by now has been imposed, in one way or another, on everyone, with or without their consent - this system is not just completely fucked up, it is a weapon wielded by those who have power, a weapon aimed directly and deliberately at the hearts of the people and communities and cultures that are considered lesser.

In this way, it is a system that does exactly what it has been designed to.

[...]

But, Internets, be it known. Making a black-and-white moral issue out of piracy, and in the process defending capitalist, imperialist Western notions of intellectual property rights, is unlikely to make me sympathize with your concerns.

Doing so while completely ignoring just how dangerous and destructive these capitalist, imperialist Western notions of intellectual property rights have been, for indigenous and other underprivileged minority communities in the West as well as for the rest of the world, is unlikely to make me sympathize with your concerns.

Doing so while being a white author who has written a book based on the Maori culture, an indigenous culture which has directly suffered from the Western legal system and its concept of intellectual property rights, is unlikely to make me sympathize with your concerns.

Rebuking a reader by saying that they are using the tone argument against you, when as a writer there is no structural or systemic inequality you have historically faced from your readers, when as a writer you are the one in a position of relative authority in that situation, when as a writer your voice is the one heard, and given attention and weight to, is unlikely to make me sympathize with your concerns.

Rebuking a reader by saying that they are using the tone argument against you, when you are the only white person in the convo, when there is no other oppression at work, is unlikely to make me sympathize with your concerns.

ETA: Asghsajkgs, because I fail like that, you better go read troisroyaumes entry where she linked all the awesome posts everyone wrote:

On piracy and copyright.