Giving the Keynote address at Mipcom, Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney has broken with studio convention and recognised piracy as a business model to compete with, as opposed to simply an illegal threat to be battled. Sweeney's pragmatic conversion came after seing - within 15 minutes of the ABC network premiere of Despearate Housewives - a high-quality, ad-free version that had appeared on P2P networks. (link to the rest of the story)I think it's good to see a company finally start to think about where technology and our ability to access and share what we want the way we want. I'm amazed that any of these media giants call average people with computers pirates. Everything we look at or read or listen to on our computers are copies of copies of copies. That's how computers work.
Entertainment companies are the pirates. They charge 5 bucks for 5 cents worth of coke. They design parks that our kids cry and beg us to take them to, charge us 60 or 70 bucks a head, and then make us stand in lines in the hot sun for hours. Those interned at Guantanamo are treated better. And they call computer file sharers pirates?
It's about time we pay what most of this entertainment is worth: nothing. If I like it, I can listen to it. If I hate it, I can delete it. I'm not stuck with it. That's a beautiful thing.
Note: soon it will be considered piracy to use somebody else's recipe or copy a menu item: (link)
What next? What's the crazist thing you think could be copyrighted?
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