Congress should heed their own advice

At this point in our country, it is almost taken as a fact that Congress and our elected lawmakers will end up doing something hypocritical.  

The most recent of this multitude of infractions comes in the wake of all of the debates and rage surrounding the SOPA and PIPA acts, as well as the new ACTA act.  

If you haven't heard anything about these then you probably haven't been on the Internet for a few months, and I suggest looking them up.

Working together to compare blocked IP assignments with those known of Congress officials' office IPs, TorrentFreak, Hurricane Electric and YouHaveDownloaded managed to track the habits of our officials.  Surprise!

During this time of political banter, they have been pirating everything from self-help books and software to television shows and pornographic material.  

Not only have they been using it for a wide range of materials, but they have also accumulated well over 800 hits in the search.

I realize that the idea of piracy is rampant across many countries and needs to be stopped in some form.  

However, when big name record companies are the ones complaining, it's hard to see it as an honest and sympathetic appeal to the population to stop hurting artists when we download things.  

Censorship is clearly not the way out, as shown by research that shows piracy has not slowed down despite the government shutdown of Megaupload and the voluntary closure of BT Junkie.

It's interesting when bands, or independent companies, speak up for themselves on the issue because they seem to have a positive spin on what record companies play out as a dismal and world-ending ordeal.  

The publicity provided by multimedia sharing sites is invaluable, especially when it costs the band nothing outside of studio costs to create it.

The fan base does the rest of the work to get their name out.  

Having a large enough fan base gets the attention of the record companies when they think they can make money, and as such, free publicity is essentially obtained.

This discovery just goes to show that even Congress isn't above utilizing torrents and downloading despite pressing for our government to be able to shut down entire sites and IPs for both piracy and copyright infringement.  

I feel that there is a distinct difference between pirating and just downloading things, where pirating would be the intentional downloading and reselling of material for an individual's profit, and downloading itself would be for private use.  

Having a try-before-you-buy mentality is nearly essential in American culture, and often times we have the previews, demonstrations, samples, and reviews from purchasing peers to aid this process.  

Simply stated, downloading an album to see how it sounds makes perfect sense, especially when it spurs purchases through iTunes or CDs.  

Granted, the population that uses the luxury versus those that actually buy them first is relatively lopsided, but it definitely happens.

When it comes down to it, Congress is obviously worrying itself over this issue since debt problems, cutting government expenditure, and other problems are able to take a back seat when influence comes through in terms of big money.  

However, since it is an issue here and now, I definitely recommend reading up on what has been happening if you don't know, and then figuring out how to help in the cause.