When will the media realise that people are going to get their hands on products regardless of who they target? When you shut down one website, another opens. If you take down people for allowing file sharing, I’ll bet that another ten will replace each one in a hydra-esque spawning, probably hiding behind pseudonyms and other such measures, but still active. If you make your products hard to get a hold of especially, people are going to find a way to get their hands on it if they enjoy the product. Is that not a good thing? Are the people that are so desperate to see something that they can’t wait until the DVD comes out or until they can afford the DVD the more long-term fans of whatever your selling? Aren’t they the people that will later buy the merchandise, tell all their friends about it (and subsequentlly convert a few into buying what you’re selling) and in the long run be the best investments under your radar? I suppose I’d be able to answer that question if I’d have taken a business course instead of a Biology one, but it does really interest me, because that seems like a logical train of events to me, and something that I don’t think I thought would spew from my fingers onto my keyboard when I thought I’d say that I think the arrest of the founder of the pirate bay was a dick move.
Also, you probably knew that I would have something essentially akin to that to say about the incident. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you by being unpredictable, especially when I feel strangely passionate about the freedom of people to fileshare.
Perhaps I would sympathise if I was in business. Perhaps I’d look at what’s changing in the way we consume media and think that it’s a big problem that needs to be solved. Instead however, I’m looking at the way it’s changing and the media’s extreme reaction to it, and thinking to myself that this could probably be resolved a lot more quietly by finding a way in which both new and old methods of distribution can marry without either side damaging the other as much as it appears they are trying to.
Perhaps I’m too ignorant of this topic to understand it properly, but it seems to me as if the first instinct of the larger corporations to what the internet has allowed us to do is to declare war on something that they don’t quite understand.
