+1. Show biz may be stupid, they may offer a lousy service and an irrational business model. But it's in the nature of a right that the holder has liberty to

+1. Show biz may be stupid, they may offer a lousy service and an irrational business model. But it's in the nature of a right that the holder has liberty to exercise it as they choose, no matter how stupid or irresponsible that exercise may seem to others. A respect for copyright revocable at the user's convenience is no respect at all. And yes, property is a right, one of far greater importance to political liberty than is generally allowed. And intellectual property is property. The placement of economic activity _outside_ the direct control of the state prevents the state from entirely dominating the society. Now, SOPA is a really bad bill, because DNS filtering is a free speech nightmare. If you make me choose between speech rights and property rights, I'm taking the speech right, it's the foundation of everything else. The willingness of show biz and its lackeys to mess with speech rights demonstrates a disturbing greed and / or ignorance. But that doesn't mean they're wrong about everything. It's a complicated world, and technology is revising the everyday realization of our rights and responsibilities. We aren't going to work our way through that with a black-and-white simplification of the debates.