And people think America's a democracy...
I'm starting to think the very definition of the word is being lost by a lot of Western politicians, and not only Americans. Seeing as information can circulate so quickly nowadays, it's extremely easy to goad the masses into expressing paranoia or to fear whatever it is they don't understand.
I'm pretty sure piracy is this generation's new Red Scare, alongside Muslim terrorists. The moral fibre of people using Torrent trackers is being put into question, and I'm sure you could all think of several "test" cases over the last few years, where sudden and massive crackdowns were operated against superseeders. I have a neighbour with several two-terabyte hard drives nestled into a sort of personal server farm, which he's crammed to the brim with stuff he yanks off P2P networks. I'm sure he's received infringement notices from his ISP, but Canada's notoriously lax in that respect. Beyond a slap on the wrist, nothing seems to be done.
Then, last summer, completely out of the blue, I started hearing about how the RCMP was trying to actively pursue people who'd downloaded "The Hurt Locker" before its release in theatres. This was Canada trying to prove it could be just as much of a bully as its downstairs neighbour, I guess. Arrests were made, headlines were printed, my folks were extremely worried that I might have downloaded the flick (I hadn't, seeing as I'd seen it on the silver screen, fair and square).
After that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We occasionally get headlines designed to remind us that evil, EEEEEVIL piracy is still a chief concern, and that there's kids armed with DV cams sneaking into showings. aXXo is still sometimes mentioned as the biggest content provider on the scene - you'll know the name if you've ever flirted with P2P sites before - while this is no longer accurate. Across Demonoid and The Pirate Bay, there now are content providers with faster delivery times and more immediate responses than whoever aXXo is.
What we're seeing is an industry that refuses to change, because changing copyright laws to accommodate more widespread forms of digital distribution would undermine the foundations of some of the world's biggest legal content providers. I'm talking game publishers, movie and music studios, as well as some book publishers.
To its credit, though, the medium of paper publishing is still evolving much faster than the rest. Several American publishers have embraced the eBook format and generally tried to issue appropriately priced electronic versions of their paper catalog; but you can plainly see that the MPAA and RIAA don't give a rat's ass about digital distribution. Why should they give a shit, when they've seen how much of a cash cow the 3D trend is? The most we see is timid deals landed with YouTube to allow for movies that are just short of becoming part of the public domain be released on the seldom-updated Movies section.
Try it out, once, it's pretty striking. YouTube touted that feature as being a new way to watch movies, when all we're seeing is the release of public domain movies or fairly obscure releases - along with a weird concentration of Bollywood titles.
Bollywood? Really?
The short of it is that things need to change. The current model for the handling of intellectual properties is clearly outdated. I'll be the first to say everyone needs to be paid, but we're clearly heading straight for a brick wall. In trying to safeguard the jobs of set carpenters, CG artists, level designers, sound engineers, programmers, actors musicians and countless others, these legal providers are turning not just America, but most of the Western world into one big police state.
There *has* to be some sort of agreeable middle ground, some way to ensure that the artisans behind the scenes aren't being cheated, while allowing for accessibility and ease of use.
