I've seen nonsense upvoted, but typically whoever points out the nonsense is also acknowledged and upvoted. (Edit: when I posted, the above comment was far in the grey.)
Folks, the abuses of governments and corporations trying to enforce copyright doesn't make copyright meaningless and/or evil, and you will not win your fight by embracing lazy e-rhetoric over reason.
I'm not seeing the lazy rhetoric of which you speak. The grandparent made a pretty simple assertion; worded a little differently, our government rejects the justifications used by other governments to censor their people, and at the same time seeks to censor its own people using rather more dubious justifications.
Perhaps you have an actual objection to this statement?
Edit: For the record, I have no problem with my government actively undermining censorship in foreign countries, and in fact I heartily endorse it in this case.
The conformity of the geeky echo-chamber on the subject of copyright law worries me. The trouble with echo chambers is not just that extreme opinions (e.g. that media piracy is okay and all intellectual property law should be abolished) start to seem mainstream to those inside them, but that the folks who want to have extreme opinions then have to adopt even more extreme opinions.
Here, for instance, we have the opinion that not only is media piracy okay, but that any government attempt to stop it is not merely as bad as but worse than, say, the Chinese Government's ongoing attempts to censor anyone who dares to say "Hey, the Chinese Government kinda sucks".
I don't think existing IP law is ideal, by any means, nor do I think that it's what I think it should be (and I'm not so arrogant to assume that what I think the law should be and what the law really should be are the same thing, since copyright law is intrinsically a compromise between different types of people, and there's certainly no reason why my personal preferences should take precedence over anyone else's). And I'm happy to engage and argue with people who have extreme opinions, but the correct way to express an extreme opinion starts off with an acknowledgement "OK, this might sound crazy but hear me out..." rather than a bald-faced assertion that "wah wah, enforcing copyright law is like shovelling babies into gas chambers" or whatever.
Well then you're in luck. Read my comment again, as well as illumin8's, and observe that nowhere do we say that piracy is "okay", nor do we ever mention babies and gas chambers.
I'll ask you the same question as cynicalkane: do you have a specific objection to the assertion that U.S. government is being hypocritical here?
I never advocated piracy, but don't you think it's just a little bit scary that ICE has the power to shut off domain names just because a company like Sony said there was naughty content on it?
But there were no extreme positions expressed in the comment you were responding to. The comment is compatible with extreme positions but certainly doesn’t express them.
Folks, the abuses of governments and corporations trying to enforce copyright doesn't make copyright meaningless and/or evil, and you will not win your fight by embracing lazy e-rhetoric over reason.