Posted 1/20/2012 05:44:00 PM by Douglas

The problem with a very successful business model is that eventually other people want in on your action and the public gets tired of paying you to see you get richer. Enter Hollywood, who, for about 100 years now has been surprising even themselves at how much money they can extract from the public. Well the internet came along and threw a HUGE kink in their supply chain. Now when you hear a catchy tune on the radio, you don't have to go shell out $17 for one decent song and nine tracks of filler on a crappy CD (the studio should be shot for selling a CD with only 10 tracks on it, too, but that's another rant that luckily we don't have to deal with anymore). You don't have to spend $12 a seat at that over-hyped movie that's out now, just to find out they put the two funny bits in the commercial.

So, equating every downloaded song or movie to a lost sale (which is absolute horse shit), the RIAA and MPAA have strong-armed the Department of Justice to force the hand of the elite New Zealand police to shut down one of the internet's biggest source of shared online content, MegaUpload.I don't quite understand why the Department of Justice has a case when a kid in Singapore uploads an episode of Newhart to a server in Hong Kong and another kid in Denmark downloads it because he doesn't know who Suzanne Pleshette is, but that's hardly the point. They're desperate to stop the downloading, and they'll do anything to get these sites shut down, even temporarily. So what did MegaUpload do, anyway?

In other words, the company is being faulted for not monitoring what each of its users did on its service, not inspecting content as it was being uploaded for copyright violations, and not combing through its servers for infringing material. But that's inconsistent with the rulings from several federal courts, which have held that online companies have no duty to police their services to prevent infringements or detect them after they occur. Instead, it's up to copyright owners to alert them to infringing files, at least until a company has been found liable and ordered to stop the piracy.

Wow, they didn't monitor ALL their user's content. I'm sure that's a first. Is there a reason this raid came on the day after the SOPA/PIPA blackout day? Seems like they know this law is going to fail, and this is their one chance to make a stand. Well kudos to you, Hollywood lobbyists. You've stopped media being downloaded from the internet just like the DEA has stopped the influx of illegal drugs into the country. Which is to say, not at all. You just make yourself look more desperate when you coerce another sovereign nation into using Pablo Escobar techniques to apprehend him:

Dotcom, the megamind behind Megaupload, was arrested yesterday in New Zealand, his panic-room door busted down by officials, who found the hacker clinging to a sawed-off shotgun.

Wow. I had no idea the police had guns in New Zealand, much less eccentric overweight millionaires. Who knew?

Look, I don't know what the answer is, but artists need to be paid for their work. I have a couple of DVDs and CDs that I've paid over $100 for. I've also got some 99¢ disks that don't even make good coasters (damn hole in the middle). I don't know how to make the 'honor system' work for media consumption now that the internet has made downloading so easy, but Hollywood has to stop thinking they're back in the day when they can keep churning out crap and we'll keep buying it because we have no choice. Because now we do.