Welcome Your New IP Masters
It's good to know that when our country is threatened that our lawmakers will jump into action to protect us, leveraging resources and spending money to form giant new bureaucracies and establish White House-level positions to combat this major threat.
What is this threat that Congress has put such a high priority on? Is it fixing our disaster preparedness so tragedies like Katrina don't happen again? Could it be a bulking up of our health system to protect the citizens against a possible pandemic?
If you picked either of those options, or any other so-called commonsense threat, than you clearly have your priorities out of whack.
No, this threat that the U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly chosen to battle against is copyright protections, anti-piracy measures and stopping those pesky college kids from downloading MP3s.
With the release of the videogame "Grand Theft Auto 4" we are starting to see a wave of media and politicians condemning the game as an amoral destroyer of our culture, and in many cases calling for a ban of the game. And aside from their hatred of the game and any game like it, most of these people have another thing in common: They have never played the game and, outside of Solitaire and online Scrabble games, they don't play videogames at all.
