Anti-piracy campaigns

In 2009 in New York appeared ads with a message to citizens that downloading music and
movies without paying for them "kills jobs" in the city. The argumentation is that New York is a
capital of American TV, literary and phonographic industry, but what percent of the New Yorkers
work in media? Only about 100,000 New Yorkers work in the movie industry, which is not much
compared to over 8 million people of total city population and almost 19 million citizens of the
metropolitan area. One may judge that such campaigns choose wrong slogans. Saying that people
should buy music and movies to fight with unemployment may sound somehow ridiculous
(Sandoval, 2009)

The American Chamber of Commerce has recently started a website
www.fightonlinetheft.com on which one can watch a testimonial of a woman saying that her friend
died because of taking some medication purchased online. She says that Marcia Bergeron died five
years ago, a day after she had visited her home in Canada. In a video promoted by the US Chamber
of Commerce, it is said that Marcia relied on the web for most of her shopping. The woman was
complaining of flu symptoms. After her death the coroner reported that the cause of the death was
cardiac arrhythmia caused by metal toxicity, in other words the drugs poisoned her to death. There
is also a quote from the Wall Street Journal:

"This isn't college kids swapping MP3s, as in the 1990s. Rather, rogue websites set up
shop overseas and sell U.S. consumers bootleg movies, TV shows, software, video games, books
and music, as well as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fashion, jewelry and more... The Internet has
been a tremendous engine for commercial and democratic exchange, but that makes it all the more
important to police the abusers who hijack its architecture. SOPA merely adapts the current avenues
of legal recourse for infringement and counterfeiting to new realities. Without rights that protect the
creativity and innovation that bring fresh ideas and products to market, there will be far fewer ideas
and products to steal."

It is interesting however, that the idea is to fight this kind of abuse in the Internet and not in
the real world. There are many votes that the government should rather control what is being
imported to the country than create laws that allow many abuses and can be potentially used in
many other ways and for many different unspecified purposes. The opposers claim that physical and
digital merchandise shouldn’t go together in the legislation. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), for
instance, claims that pursuing fake goods in real merchandise can be accomplished in many other
effective ways, for example by inspecting shipping containers. Moreover, shouldn't be Department
of Health Care Services responsible for taking care of inspecting drugs imported to US and sold in
this country (SaM, 2011)?