I still remember the old adage that my parents tried to stuff down my throat as a kid when they were trying to get me to stop doing something while they themselves were doing it – do as I say not as I do . I think most of us have had to deal with that kind of better than thou crap in our lives but it rankles even worse when it comes from the people t hat we elect to represent us in government.
Case in point this whole nonsense around SOPA and how the entertainment back Congress is trying its damnedest to gain control of the Internet at the behest of their corporate backers.
On one hand they tell us that it’s illegal and well .. just plain wrong to download movies and music among other things without paying for them, even though most studies have proven that if you make it easy to buy people will in fact pay for what they download. Then on the other hand as the team at TorrentFreaks found out those self-same politicians are just as guilty of pirating stuff as anyone else.
Since it’s the birthplace of the pending SOPA bill, we wondered how many of the employees there have engaged in unauthorized copying.
The answer is yet again unambiguous – they pirate a lot.
In total we found more than 800 IP-addresses assigned to the U.S. House of Representatives from where content has been shared on BitTorrent. After a closer inspection it quickly became clear the House isn’t just using it for legitimate downloads either, quite the opposite.
Below we’ll list a few of the 800 hits we found on YouHaveDownloaded , which in turn represent just a fraction of total downloads since the site only tracks a limited percentage of total BitTorrent traffic. Again, this is real and confirmed data that is just as good as the evidence used by the RIAA when they sued tens of thousands of people for file-sharing.
I wonder how Microsoft will deal with the fact that someone in the Hill seems to think it’s okay to pirate Windows.
Once again we have those in power thinking and acting in ways that they would see you and me arrested for and spend years in jail.
Me, I’m not the least bit surprised.
