Impotent With Rage, Psychotic File-Sharers Bite The Hand That Feeds Them

[Guest bigdady]

Ask any veteran of the file-sharing community who their arch-enemies are and it’s safe to presume that the RIAA and MPAA will be the first two stones at the top of the piracy hate-pyramid. After all, when it comes to disrupting the activities of pirates – and in some cases ruining their lives – they have few equals. But are the music and movie industries justified in their actions when, after all, they’re supplying most of the content on which file-sharers survive?

“The loathing that many pirates demonstrate for people in the film and music industries has a furious vitriolic intensity. What drives this extremism? After all, these industries are providing the entertainment that these people spend so much of their lives consuming,” says an article on the copyright focused 1709 Blog.

The situation that provoked the article on 1709 Blog was the news that the administrators of BitTorrent site FileSoup had walked free after their cases were dropped by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service.

However, the 1709 Blog article “Parasites in the FileSoup” concentrated not on the main news, but on the reactions from both TorrentFreak and Telegraph readers who made their opinions known in no uncertain terms.

“Fuck you Hollywood !!!! Boycott all mafiaa material,” said Gorehound as quoted by 1709 Blog.

“‘Good,” said Quinn. “Success for the ordinary folks over the Fat Cats who are still living in the past.”

So what provokes these strong emotions? On these and other similar comments, the 1709 Blog has a theory.

“Overwhelmed by the glut of content on P2P networks, file-sharers have lost control of their lives. Impotent with rage, they bite the hand that feeds them. They have made themselves the slaves of media-consumption – and who better to blame than the parasites, the scum, the spivs, the fat cats who ‘lord it over’ their screens?”

Regular TF commenter Rob8urcakes, who was also quoted on 1709 Blog, explained his contempt for the people behind the FileSoup legal action in quite different terms.

“The greedy, over-zealous asswipes that pursued this case to Court were so blinded by their own rage they saw no sense other than to try and prosecute these 2 guys to the full extent of the law,” he wrote.

“That meant their stupidity overwhelmed them by getting police to charge Filesoup under the CRIMINAL law of conspiracy rather than the civil offence of copywrong infringement. These crazed dummies from FACT wanted to chase down a small, almost defenceless site and get the Admins jailed as criminals in order to set an example and gain a legal precedent.”

So have file-sharers really lost control when they “bite the hand that feeds them”, or are they simply reacting to overwhelming bullying behavior as shown in the FileSoup case or the mauling of Jammie Thomas or Joel Tenenbaum?

Do people in the file-sharing community have every right to be angry or are they forgetting who supplies most of this content in the first place? Does consumer unfriendly DRM give people good reason to feel like they’re being pushed around even when they’re paying, or are the entertainment industries justified in doing whatever they like with their content?

Is the rage against the so-called MAFIAA machine the inevitable backlash against years of customers being taken for granted or, as 1709 Blog puts it, does “the endless repetition of these sentiments have a pathological, even psychotic quality” about them?

As usual, the comments section is now open. We know you’ll have your say.