>If you want to know why the DOJ considers copying a few million copyrighted documents to be a crime worthy of jail time and enforcement as if you're mixed up with organized crime, you have to look no further than the tech industry itself.
To be more precise, the specific subset that sells proprietary software. I don't imagine Amazon or Canonical or Facebook are big BSA supporters.
To be fair, that specific subset basically was the tech industry until relatively recently. The BSA was founded about 16 years before Canonical or Facebook. Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, etc, are the giants on whose shoulders Facebook, etc, are now standing. They built this industry. Also, given that Amazon sells books, movies, music, and other IP products, I think their interests are aligned much more closely with those of the BSA member companies than with those of companies like Google, Facebook, etc, who make their money disseminating other peoples' content.
>Amazon sells books, movies, music, and other IP products
Amazon sells everything. Microsoft and Universal are very much affected if you use your money to buy a faster computer or a bigger television instead of a software license or a DVD. Amazon isn't, because they're just as happy to sell you either one.
>Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, etc, are the giants on whose shoulders Facebook, etc, are now standing. They built this industry.
An ironic statement if you look at the technologies underlying Facebook et al: Almost to a one they're Linux servers running open source or custom in-house database software. And I don't think it would be a stretch to say that the newness of this is attributable in significant part to the steps Microsoft took in the 80s and 90s to thwart competition, if not for which the cracking of the Windows monopoly that we are only seeing now may have happened ten or twenty years ago.
But more than that, I still think it's fair to say that the tech industry today is on the whole not supportive of these draconian penalties, and it is more appropriate to point the finger where it belongs, at the specific entities who actually were (and, barring any reversals as a result of recent events, still are).
To be more precise, the specific subset that sells proprietary software. I don't imagine Amazon or Canonical or Facebook are big BSA supporters.