Because piracy is killing the US...

[Jagos]

I would have put this in the comedy section, but somehow, I feel that this was too good for that thread. No, Viacom, who just gave their CEO a $50M stock option raise, is saying that piracy is killing them:

The anti piracy ad

What's absolutely amazing is the fact that today, when tomorrow is American Censorship Day, is the day we have some facts about piracy.

From the same research group that brought about the "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, Joe Karaganis finds quantifiable data on piracy and how much people actually pirate here in the US.

The Copy Culture survey was sponsored by The American Assembly, with support from a research award from Google. The content of the survey and its findings are solely the responsibility of the researchers. The U.S. survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. The results are based on interviews on landline and cellular telephones conducted in English with 2,303 adults age 18 or older living in the continental United States from August 1-31, 2011. For results based on the entire sample, the margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.

For the sake of convenience I'll only post the bolded parts in a quote:

Preliminary Conclusions
- ‘Piracy’ is common.
- Large-scale digital piracy is rare
- Console-based video game piracy is very rare
- Legal media services can displace piracy.
- Copyright infringement among family and friends is widely accepted 
- Only a slim majority of Americans (52%) support penalties for downloading copyrighted music and movies—and limit this support to warnings and fines
- Disconnection from the Internet, in particular, is very unpopular
- Among those who support fines, 75% support amounts under $100 per song or movie infringed
- For a majority of Americans (54%), due process in such matters requires a court
- Solid majorities of American Internet users oppose copyright enforcement when it is perceived to intrude on personal rights and freedoms.
- Comparable majorities (56%) oppose government involvement in “blocking” access to infringing material. 
- Blocking and filtering by commercial intermediaries such as ISPs, social media sites, and search engines receive majority support—until the questions include likely consequences.

There's also a post at Techdirt showing the data more succintly and with an alternative explanation.

The reason I point to this data is for one main reason. Tomorrow, Congress is hearing about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) at 10 AM Eastern Time. This is the bill that is looking to censor people on the internet with accusations. Websites can be taken down, with all funding cut by Viacom for the mere accusation of piracy. Now look at the people complaining about piracy in their designer clothes and chic offices. Then look at the people that are accused of copyright infringement. Does the punishment fit the crime?