[pp.int.general] About Black March

[Pat Maechler aka Valio]

Lately I've seen a number of calls to action for "Black March" whose
participants are urged not to acquire any kind of artistic works
during March 2012 [1].
The idea behind it is to deny profits to the "content industry" in
order to stop them from their heavy loobying activities.

In it's current form I would strongly advise against participating or
continue spreading it!
I urge all pirates to participate solely with a heavily sophisticated
version of this action or otherwise to publicly distance themselves
from it.

In the current form it's one of the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
I appreciate the intention, but unforntunately that will likely not
matter: Likely mass media will display those participating to be
against art or artists in general.
Thus, those who support it (or are jus even just getting linked to it)
will be placed close to the most inhumane regimes known in the history
of mankind.

To propose an alternative: It would be way better and more
sophisticated to program and distribute programs that warn users of
artistic works, that have beem
which are marketed by corporations which use said lobbying, such as
the "big 6" [3]. This has been has already been done for SOPA / PIPA,
making, so it is it possible [2a][2b].

I write this now, as there seems to be more and more supporter of this
call to action in it's unsophisticated, poulistic and dangerous
version
I have been personally supporting artists and programmers for years
that work on their own an not via the "content industry"; I will
continue to so in March as well.
>From my perspective one of the aim of the pirate movement is the
liberation of art from copyright, but it has never been the liberation
of the world from art.
However the latter one is a common accusation by opponents of the
pirate movement.
If this action is carried out in the current form without clearly
communicating *in advance* that would be solely targeted at the
"content industry", but not artists it will be used as an argument
against you in mass media.

This is solely my personal opinion. It is not an official
communication as part of any of my current mandates.

Sidenote: I would like to take the opportunity to advertise the
project political javascript. [5]

[1] http://black-march.com/
[2a] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/01/09/android-barcode-scanner-app-detects-if-a-products-maker-supports-sopa/
[2b] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/boycott-plus/
[3] http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main
[4] http://gun.io/blog/progressjs-political-javascript/

-pat