MPAA
Got this link via neowin.net. To me it smacks of arrogance and heavy-handedness. I can just imagine the people who are really into content/video piracy getting a feeling of justification that they are working on a crusade against “the man”, the corrupt establishment etc. The approach of gloating that they won a court battle by putting their message on the web site of the loser strikes me as being counter-productive in the long run. I am all for artists and producers of content getting paid for their sweat, talent and risk. Otherwise people won’t take the big risks because they won’t get the rewards. If the originators of content don’t get a benefit, we’re all worse off. But… technology changes our societies massively. So instead of fighting against the wave, why not ride it?
Why not instead take advantage of the massive reduction in distribution costs and easy access to huge world wide markets that the Internet/broadband enables and provide easy access to reasonably priced content so very few have any inclination to get access to pirated content. This is effectively what happened with itunes, even though the pricing is still way too high. Give people an easy and reasonably priced option and they’ll go to in droves. “Reasonably priced” means something totally different in a broadband enabled world, where the distribution costs for “bits”/content is “stuff all” (i.e. close to zero).