[mrdingle]

Campaign finance reform and biased media coverage are different beasts entirely. Murdoch owns Fox whether corporations are people or not, and he loves your disparaged argument. Besides, I'd rather be lied to in the face by the news that have my senators bought and sold behind closed doors.

Also, all of the plan you propose is already happening. It's called the creative process. I bet a large portion, if not the majority, of your entertainment is now facilitated by self published content given away for free on the internet. Youtube videos, remixes, wikipedia, flickr, twitter, facebook updates. All of this stuff is 'High Quality' culture that is available to you for free.

Copyright is great. It's necessary. It facilitates things like Creative Commons and the GPL. Abusive copyright holding organizations on the other hand are not so great. They exist only to exert control over their holdings and have recently risen to unprecedented levels of power because of the money we directly give them.

To call a boycott against these organizations futile is to miss the point of the boycott. It's not about putting them out of business. It's about awareness and slowly changing the overall public perception of an issue so fundamental and important as copyright reform and voting with your dollars.

So try not to get so discouraged and remember you give them the power. Seriously. Vote with you dollars (and with a ballot).

[armandososa]

I may be wrong, but I think his point is: even if they couldn't bribe politicians, they still could blackmail them with bad coverage.

[jiggy2011]

That's true, or reward them with good coverage.

Here in the UK we actually have rules that say that TV news shows must remain non partisan. Of course people still accuse them of bias, but they are nothing like Fox news.

I imagine the 1st amendment would prevent a similar thing happening in the US.

Our newspapers however are often extremely partisan however and Murdoch still has much influence here through "The Sun" paper.

I guess with more content online , people could do something similar. "I have 100,000 followers, don't pass SOPA or I'll make a mean youtube video about you".