“To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property…”

Good thing the TSA is now patrolling the roads in conjunction with ICE. I can’t count how many trucks loaded with American IP I’ve seen hightailing it to Mexico. One was stacked to the ceiling with pending patents. Another had nothing but 1’s and 0’s in it but still somehow managed to be over the weight limit.

I saw an ICE agent dressed in a Donald Duck outfit (undercover?) patting down a semi driver for any extra Brothers Grimm stories he might have hidden on his person. I even saw Smith’s former IT person sitting in the back of squad car while SWAT-geared officers searched his trunk for unlicensed photos. He claimed he had no idea the photos weren’t in the public domain, at which point the ICE agent let out a huge guffaw, stating in a barely intelligible quack that “the public domain is nothing but a pirate myth.”

But the worst thing I saw, the thing that chilled me right to my completely American bones, was a trailer full of nothing but empty hard drives, each one capable of housing huge tracts of intellectual property, and if one had the means to link them, could contain all of the mp3s at allofmp3.com with room to spare. The worst part, though? The hard drives were stamped “Made in China.”

At that point I wept harder than any person with first world problems like “intellectual property theft” has ever wept, knowing that all of our hard-won IP would now be freely handled by third-world countries where reliable and affordable sources of food, heat and clean water were not much more than a hazy mirage on the very distant horizon.

But I knew right then and there that we were right: we had the power to legislate the entire world through a controlled internet. I knew we could help add to the amount of repression and censorship in the countries that were busy victimizing our way of life. I knew that, despite America being in the midst of a recession and attendant financial crises and that an internal occupation indicated great dissatisfaction with the status quo, despite our soldiers still being embroiled in unwinnable wars and our human rights swiftly eroding back home, despite an out-of-control debt and deficit, despite public approval of all levels of government having fallen to all-time lows, I knew in my heart of hearts that this legislation would still be first and foremost in the minds of our legislators and I KNEW that despite everything else, these industries MUST BE PROTECTED.