Great article.

This is a fantastic article about modern media piracy.

It must suck to see your multi-million dollar business model reduced to ashes by some teenager in his basement. But it's hard to feel sorry for MediaDefender, their "tactics" have never really worked and are hard to consider ethical. The best you can say about them is that they were successful at using scare tactics to convince the content providers to pay for their services.

The part of this article that speaks to me is the part about Fans vs. Pirates. I consider myself a movie buff and I purchase an above average amount of DVDs ( including both HD-DVD and Blu-ray). But I have also downloaded content from P2P sites like the Piratebay. Why? Because I loathe movie theaters and I refuse to buy a DVD unseen. I download a movie and watch it, if I like it then I will buy it once its available.

Is this ethical or legal? No, but who is being harmed by this? I'm not downloading these movies and charging admission. I'm not burning the movie to DVD and selling it (even though I've been begged to do just that on many occasions). So I'm costing the movie theater an admission fee that I wouldn't have paid in the first place.

The entertainment industry is obsessed with the war on piracy and it is a war that they will never win. They should just move on and figure out a way to exploit the majority of computer users that have no fucking clue how to actually pirate media. I've tried to explain how to use Bittorrent to a lot of people and they just don't get it.

I'm sorry that the Movie, Music and Television Industry have not kept pace with technology but that's not my fault.