Re:W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @01:02AM
(#15281924)
Related: remember SOPA, and the street protests with which Poland led the way to shutting it down in Europe?
I still really don't think the protests happened because people suddenly became aware of abstract consequences of an obscure deal proposal. But exactly at that time, in an unrelated case, FBI shut down Megavideo, widely used by regular people then. This is what they took as a future of Internet under SOPA, and that's why, I believe (based on first-hand experience), they went to the streets.
Re:W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns
by lovich on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @04:46PM
(#15288657)
Yea, I don't think the op does this himself but as a group the people on hacker news vasciliate between, comouter literacy is the new literacy and something that requires you downloading two programs(Torrent software and VPN) and go to one website, is beyond anyone but software devs. Computer literacy _is_ the new literacy so is it suprising that regular people can start doing things on computers for themselves?
I'm not sure how true that is. Currently getting content is easy enough that the average consumer doesn't use it, but at least back in the mid 00's the technical people in my social circle got introduced to torrents by people who didn't know how turn off a computer except by unplugging it. They we're willing to take all sorts of risks with their computer on sketchy sites the second it became the easiest way to get their content.
If torrents and piracy become the easiest way again, I could easily see regular people going right back to it.