Today is blackout day. Google has gone dark by censoring their logo. Reddit has gone dark. Many channels on youtube have gone dark. And The Biscuit made another statement.

“Let’s be honest, the people behind SOPA/PIPA are smart, very smart. They know without a doubt the bill will not put a dent in piracy. The kind of people who pirate and run piracy services are far too smart to be brought to heel by mere legislation and have continued to elude the best efforts of the US and it’s lackeys. SOPA/PIPA exists for one reason, to protect an aging and crooked business model, dominated by large corporations who are slowly but surely being eroded by people like you and me.

These corporations want to stifle the internet because the internet is the biggest threat to their dominance that has ever existed. For decades, through control of radio stations and television channels, corporations have made bank, but now, all the money in the world can’t save them from guys in their bedrooms and home-made studios creating content that is more relevant to the current generation. The variety the big media corporations refused to provide because it “wasn’t profitable”, is now being provided by hundreds of thousands of amateur, semi-pro and professional independent creators and directors and we’re all competing for the most important currency of all, time.

The time you spend watching our material is time you don’t spend watching theirs. It’s money directly out of their pocket that they could have been earning before the internet came along and that’s the hilarious thing about this whole deal. Piracy is not what’s killing their profits, completely legitimate competition from the internet is. They use the cause of “fighting piracy” as a trojan horse to force through bought and paid for legislation to kill independent content creation for good because they can see the end is nigh for their aging and increasingly irrelevant business model. They know they cannot win legitimately, so they do what they’ve always done, exploit a corrupt political system to bully and extort their way to what they want.

This is what SOPA/PIPA are really about and that is why you should oppose them. You are standing up for what your generation represents, just as previous generations have done the same on a slew of different issues. As much as those in power would like us to believe we are the apathetic, lazy generation. The truth is we are anything but and that scares the shit out of them.”

Original post: http://www.facebook.com/cynicalbrit/posts/10150472748921053

(btw, under SOPA posting this article here would be copyright infringment, and wordpress would be DNS blocked)

Husky also made a statement:

TB’s spot on, so’s Husky. Heck, I don’t have a tv anymore. There’s never anything interesting on. I rather watch TB’s or Jesse Cox’s channel on youtube. Wowcrendor, the Yogscast, Husky, day9, etc. It’s a lot more entertaining and interesting. News I get from the net, which is far more neutral than the newspapers and government tv in Austria. And of course this industry is scared. Imagine more people do it the way I’m doing it. They would lose a lot of money. Oh, they already are.  Last I heard isthat in Germany the sales of newspapers are declining. Why? Because the papers are biased and the people are getting tired of the same old nonsense.

Let’s take Japan as an example when it comes to piracy. They have laws in place and police goes after the big pirates in the country. They have a fair share of snatches every year. And despite that file sharing on Share and Perect Dark is still alive and running (it’s where I get my dramas, and if I like them I buy them, of course, some dramas I can’t buy since the studios don’t release them on DVD… BOO!) Plus, I haven’t heard anything of laws like SOPA or PIPA being even considered. Though, you have to consider, the marketing and management of the big labels in Japan seems to be significantly more advanced than in the US.

Let’s take AVEX. HUGE label they are. They have many, if not most, of the big names in Japan’s music industry under their belt. But they also have plenty of smaller groups. The distribution of music works very nicely. Let’s take AKB48 (since they’re everywhere these days.) Let’s say they bring a new song. You can buy the CD, yep, but you can get it just as easily from iTunes. At the same time the management will flood their youtube channel and bombard everyone who wants to see it with PVs and what not. Many of the AKB48 girls have blogs (usually on ameba), which is also used for marketing. And not just them. The amount of blogs and twitter accounts from people within the entertainment industry in Japan is HUGE. The managements actually go with the time. And that doesn’t only apply for the big names. Smaller bands do that too. Everyone does it.

MAN WITH A MISSION comes to mind at once. They started 2010 in Shibuya. Small band, small start. They were picked up by a label and are pretty successful these days. Scandal, another example. Or Baseball Bear. Not sure about Perfume, not that big a fan of them, but I doubt they started any different. Yes, j-pop/rock isn’t just Hamasaki, AKB48, SMAP and Arashi.

Anyway.

New business models appear. Some people adapt and survive with them. Others don’t and then they whine. Remember, the same people in the US industry who’re whining about piracy are the ones who also whined how the VHS cassette would destroy the movie industry. The gaming industry realized that online distribution works. Valve’s Steam is the proof. Valve started with Half Life more than a decade ago. That was all they were. One first person shooter, which, admittedly, set new standards. 12+ years later they run the largest online distributor for games worldwide. They adapted. Hollywood didn’t and now Hollywood whines.

All of Hollywood?

No!

People like George Takei are standing with us. As an actor piracy directly hits him. The more of his productions are pirated, the less money he makes and yet George Takei is on the barricdes with us. http://www.allegiancemusical.com/blog-entry/day-no-takei

And he’s not the only one.

There’s resistance and we won’t go silently. Except today, cause today is blackout day.

I shall finish with MAN WITH A MISSION, since most, if not all, of you have no idea who and how epic they are.

This is Edohiguma signing off.