U2 front man and tax refugee Bono comes out of the closet as a firm believer in China style censorship (more comments on this article are here, here, here and here). Who would have thought a guy who's based his image over the last decade on being some kind of human rights activist, would do a U-turn like this and embrace oppression:
We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.
Sure, why not. Let's make a "noble effort" to monitor all user's Internet traffic (and just forget about details like multiple computers sharing the same ip address and other minor details...) in order to protect an outdated industry refusing to renew itself and instead demanding special legislation in order to keep the profit growing. Yeah, that's the noble thing to do. You complete moron.
I also love the part about the rich, evil Internet service providers and the poor songwriters:
A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.
Swollen profits? Lost receipts? You might wonder what was in that pipe Bono just smoked. If anyone's making profit ripping off the "poor songwriters" it's the rotten to the core record labels. So please, Bono, stop embarrassing yourself by writing absolute bullshit about stuff you know nothing about, and stop promoting oppression and abolishing human rights in order to boost the profit of a vicious industry. It's really bad for your image.
If you want to read an intelligent piece of text on the subject, go read David Byrne's Survival Strateglies for Emerging Artists here. You don't have to be a slave to the CD manufacturing industry just because you want to write and/or perform music.
Or, if you're a friend of oppression, like Bono himself, read about how the Belarus are about to handle the "problem" of free speech and sharing of information. There are some good ideas to be found there.
