Susan Mernit blogs Mark Pesce’s powerful essay on BitTorrent and why Hollywood was stupid to shut down the torrent sites.
Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you’ve screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation – a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you’ll never, ever be able to defeat.In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that’s already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.
I’m convinced that the copyright holders who make up the bulk of the MPAA/RIAA membership don’t care or don’t understand that by attack the “pirates” they only drive them underground or forces them to develop new tools/platforms.
I’m convinced there is no solution period. There is no amount of DRM etc that people will tolerate and that piracy will get easier by the day to the point that in a few years you will not be able to make a service worth paying for, the free services will cover it.
So, I don’t think Hollywood is clueless. They see that they are dying and they are going kicking and screaming. For them there really is no other option