Here’s a deluge of crap

September 28, 2003

Here’s a deluge of crap from me to you, to show how much I truly care.

From our dear friends at the New York Times:

Many Hollywood executives say there is still time before free Internet movie swapping takes hold. Internet movie files are still large and unwieldy, taking as much as two hours to download.

I’d like to find whatever filesharing utility they’ve got that can promise delivery of any movie in less than two hours! Anyway, it seems that the MPAA is engaging in more acts of hilarity, as they’re apparently planning on instituting a vaguely DARE-like program for middle-school students — a program designed to instruct children about the perils of filesharing through crossword puzzles and role-playing. I can only assume that this initiative will be a perfectly wonderful success, and the MPAA’s piracy-related concerns will immediately disappear the instant that 14-year-olds stop trying to download «Shrek».

Wait, what’s that I hear? Could it possibly be the sound of the MPAA calling itself the biggest contributor to piracy? The piracy that’s actually capable of causing any kind of harm to the MPAA is the kind of piracy that involves people illegally mass-producing, and then proceeding to sell, movies. This kind of piracy is what results in pristine DVD-quality copies of, say, LOTR:TTT being available from your local store street vendor and/or Chinese smuggling ring within a week of the film’s theatrical release. This is also the kind of piracy that results in entire countries where nobody owns a legitimate copy of a given movie. This kind of piracy, not some nerd using his university’s T1 connection to download a DivX copy of «The Story of Ricky» or «The Highlander», is worth complaining about and fighting. Note, however, that for the most-pirated movies out there (like LOTR:TTT, Spider-man, and others), the early availability of pirate copies didn’t mean the movies wouldn’t make hundreds of cubic shitloads of dollars of profit. Perhaps there’s a lesson there…

In other news, specifically other news not involving me griping about the MPAA, I will now gripe about the RIAA. Just kidding! What a suprise, the RIAA hasn’t done anything in the past two hours that I feel like complaining about — nothing that I’m aware of, in any case. What I will mention, however, is that there was allegedly some huge blackout covering all of Italy tonight. By the time anybody in Italy reads this entry, the problem will have been taken care of, of course, but news may as well be news.

Song of the Moment: “Fight Test” — The Flaming Lips

5 Comments

  • Punamütsike says:

    can’t cube a shitload without knowin’ how big the load is! oaf-oaf!

  • Me says:

    The bigger problem here, I think, is that the shitload is already a measure of volume, so has units of length3. Cubing a shitload, therefore, yields some kind of abomination with units of m9 or in9 or something equally preposterous.

    The moral of the story? Don’t overanalyze this kind of thing, and above all, don’t talk to an engineer about this kind of crap. ;)

  • Marika says:

    Aww, so somebody did hear about the Italy blackout! I just happened to be out at a club in Sorrento the night it happened and left right at aroud 3:30 am. The streets were all dark and I saw more stars than I have seen in a LONG time. It was cool!

  • Marika says:

    Hehe, I like how it says I posted my comment at 3:51 am. What the hell was i doing awake at that hour?? ;-)

  • Me says:

    My last comment on Arne’s blog was at a much more reasonable time: 12:17pm. ;)

Leave a Reply to Marika

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