Do US citizens realise that this is what their government does with their authority?

How an unjust, ridiculously punitive copyright law gets passed.

• Step 1: Industry makes up outrageous lies about the industry’s “losses”:
  

  In IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefitted by $10+$7+$2=$19. Yet some simple math shows that this is nonsense: the studio is $1 richer, the trucker is $2, and the manufacturer is $7. Shockingly enough, that adds up to $10. What each participant cares about is his profits, not his revenues.

  Lazy journalists, particularly those working for media companies with related movie or TV studios, repeat this lie as if it were true.

• Step 2: Donate huge amounts of money to both US political parties, who pretend to believe your lie.
• Step 3: Both US parties support draconian anti-citizen copyright laws like SOPA. Oh, and expend the power of the US state bullying other countries to do likewise:
  

  The US ambassador in Madrid threatened Spain with “retaliation actions” if the country did not pass tough new internet piracy laws, according to leaked documents.

  Nice country you have there. Shame if something happened to it.

And that’s how an obscenely greedy person – untouchable corporate entity, in fact – who wants to lock up grandmothers because their kids downloaded a music file gets their way. Hooray!