In 1982, then president of the MPAA Jack Valenti said something really stupid; and today, pro-piracy pundits, some who weren’t even alive in 1982, rely heavily on the late man’s hyperbole to drive a wedge between creators and fans.  Valenti said in testimony before Congress, “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston ...

Last week, a report emerged from the London School of Economics claiming that piracy is not harming the entertainment industries.  One of my new Twitter pals, Jean-Phlippe Vergne (@pirateorg) sent me a link to the report calling it “scientific” rather than based on “moral claims.”  I read the report, and there’s nothing scientific about it, particularly in that it lacks ...

Last week, London-based NetNames released a report entitled Sizing the piracy universe, which reveals substantial evidence that piracy of entertainment media increased substantially over a 15-month period of study.  The author of that report is Dr. David Price, Director of Piracy and Counterfeit Analysis at NetNames. Dr. Price was kind enough to take about an hour of his time for ...

In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch (Paul Newman) sits astride his horse outside the same boxcar of the same train he’s successfully robbed over and over.  Frustrated by the railroad owner’s ceaseless but futile attempts to thwart the hold-ups, Butch proclaims, “If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing ...

Piracy only hurts big corporations, so who cares?  That’s how the saying goes, but then I don’t understand why so many corporation-hating “file sharers” insist upon giving Google free money, especially when Google is bigger than all the major Hollywood studios combined. The report conducted by Milward Brown Digital contains this observation in its executive summary: 58% of queries that ...

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