The RIAA has decided to drop all pretense and has cast their lot in with the freedom-loving souls in the Republican party. Not to imply that the Democrats are any more freedom-loving or somehow above outright bribery, they are not that. It’s just that the RIAA, in their desperation to protect their failing business model, have finally realized that when you need real muscle and real action without concern for constitutionality you pay off Republicans. As Malcolm X once said, the Democrats are foxes and the Republicans are wolves. These media conglomerates are getting very antsy about people sharing music and video outside their control. The motion picture industry is watching the same thing happen to them that happened to the music industry a few years ago. Just tonight on the news program of the local Fox affiliate, I saw some anti-piracy ads featuring real people employed by the movie industry. The message was essentially “stop downloading OUR movies because you’ll make us have to lay off all these nice regular people like you”. People who download movies and music are doing themselves a favor, in some respect. After all, the point is that these people are employed with some small portion of the revenues from when regular people like me get screwed for something with an insane profit margin like music and movies. It’s just not my job to care about what happens to some guy linked to the movie industry or to try to prop up some monopolistic business because they can’t get with the times. Look at it this way, piracy is an incentive for companies to give people what they want, namely reasonably priced media or movies they can download over the internet. People are plain tired of getting caught over the barrel and are enjoying a period of consumer revolt.
The RIAA and MPAA will continue to throw money after crooked politicians and will keep trying to sue individuals in order to scare everyone else into submission, but if we all continue to burn and share and fight we can eventually defeat them. And when that happens, they will surrender and will compromise…for a time.