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Haha look at the boarder in Arizona... give it 3-5 more years and we will be giving back land to Mexico. ICE and the federal govt is suppose to be down there protecting our land that we bought off them centuries ago. Instead they are protecting rich people from not being able to milk more money out of us.

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Educate yourself first the US didn't bought those territories it took them during the Mexico-American War on 1847. The solution for the border is not more police, fences and another police state but to regulate and stop the flow on illegal guns and money to Mexico.

You want to fix the immigration problems in the US help mexico, that simple.

Originally posted by pied:

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Actually, if you really examine who gets hurt by piracy it's the worker bees. Talk to the thousands of people who work in the trenches actually creating the content gets pirated, they are not fat cats, they are the grips, the gaffers, the carpenters, the caterers, the list goes on and on.

Piracy does hurt U.S. workers. It is something to be concerned about. The Feds would have been better served to hold their press conference on an indie movie set. Also, remember that many films don't have theatrical releases like Avatar where they can make a lot of money. Many depend on DVD and VOD sales for income. Pension funds for the "workers" also receive money from post-release income.

Yes, it's easy to yell corporate pigs, but really, the folks who run the studios are not the ones who are suffering. Just think about it before you jump to conclusions. I know that many of my friends who work in the film industry and have to pay rent and put food on the table for their kids are happy about this federal action. We hope there's more to come....

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Do you realize how many billion dollars goes into the movie industry annually? 42 billion dollars. thats even more than the agricultural income. even WITH the piracy existing on the internet and hollywood is the richest of the 3rd world economy. do you think the answer to the solution is to ban the websites and piracy? riot will increase. and more chaos and hate is increased to the government. i would give my best guess that probably 50% of the people that watch pirated movies watch it for the reason of not wanting to go to the movies or not buying the movies because they're ''rip off'' expensive. why would i wanna go squeeze myself and my gf to go watch lets say Twilight in the movie theatre when we can just watch it on my big flat screen with the comfortable sofa? so i do say communist corporate pigs

Funny that if you steal actual, physical property from your actual, physical neighbor, the authorities won't do anything unless you have concrete evidence of who it is.

But the minute you anonymously copy and redistribute a series of 700 KB file that deprives no one, plausible deniability, due process, and the right to confront your accuser go right out the window.

Deprives no one? But of course! One can make a great argument that online piracy actually promotes and advertises content (ironically, without spending 20% of your time watching ACTUAL ads), that would otherwise remain sight unseen, so buyer beware. One can even make a fantastic case that online pirates weren't going to buy it ANYways! But I have yet to see the definative argument that online pirates WOULD have bought it anyways. (If they would have, what are they doing at online piracy sites ANYways?)

For that matter, if we're having a bleeding heart for advertisers, then who pines today for the ancient art of on-screen product placement, which is much helped (litterally) exponentially by online piracy?

Let us not forget that linking to pirated content is NOT illegal, and hosting it IS. Until that fact changes, we can make all the carefully worded arguments we WANT about fairness, rights, and equality; but most of these sites, themselves, have not committed the crime.

And let us always remember what happens when the royalest of "we"s (we, the people) are legally wronged or defrauded of our money. Does a government agency spring to our defense with wishy-washy claims of what happened according to reality, and not according to the law?

Which wouldn't be an issue, except that the have-nots are clearly in the majority. And the haves will always fight tooth and nail to keep it that way.

Hollywood would be wise to suppose that, well: perhaps you CAN'T squeeze blood from a stone. But a stone can easily squeeze blood from you.

And after all... isn't that really the point of online piracy?