As noted here previously, I firmly believe under God’s Laws once any media, text or software has been rendered in a digital format, and become accessible in any way via the Internet, no copyright can apply. Yes, the digital world is different from all others, and most normal human laws do not apply. If they did, there would be no Internet. So when something can be copied electronically, permission should be assumed granted. There really is no way to stop it, and it’s frankly immoral to act as if it could be stopped.
Of course, where my tastes are concerned, just about everything people scream about and file lawsuits regarding “unauthorized copying” isn’t worth copying. I hate most movies and TV, and I can’t imagine needing any proprietary software so badly I would pirate it. If it’s not freely given, then there’s probably something nasty going on behind it in the first place. As always, you are free to steal my work here. All I can do is ask you nicely to give credit, but there really isn’t squat I can do about it, nor am I likely to do much more than send a sarcastic email. If you really like my stuff that much, chances are you are a decent person anyway.
So without further ado, let me present one more poke in the eye of the greedy jerks who try to bring meatspace rules into the virtual world of the Net: MAFIAA Fire for Firefox. The purpose of this addon is to frustrate RIAA, MPAA and ICE in the campaign to disconnect share sites via DNS. They don’t actually take the computers on which the sharing sites run; they just get a court order to force the folks running the DNS system to reroute all traffic going for a target site to some obscene page owned by the US government. What his addon does is keep track of such idiocy and catch your DNS request before it goes out on the wire. It reroutes those requests to addresses where you expect to find things. So if ICE confiscates the domain name DNS assignment for your favorite sharing site, by having MAFIAA Fire installed in Firefox, your request will still take you where you want go.
The justification is simple: ICE, as the servant of the evil guardians of unjust copyright, refuses to observe a single ethical duty to perform due diligence in checking whether the target site actually does anything wrong, refuses to obey constitutional limitations on them requiring due process, and generally is utterly unaccountable to those who pay their salaries. So by using this plugin, we restore some sense of balance of power. Be sure to read <a href=”http://mafiaafire.com/wall-of-text.php”>the FAQ</a>.
