Saturday, February 7, 2009

Online Pirates 1- Studios 0? Not so sure.



The New York Times had a front page article the other day that online sites providing links to pirate motion pictures are going to wipe out studios just like Napster eviscerated the record industry. Well, Napster and other p2p sites did do a lot of damage to the record industry. I got invited to attend the Grammys this year. You know the industry is in major decline when the likes of me are the type of people who attend the Grammys. I of course am not going to the Grammys because, like Groucho Marx, I would never join a club that would have me.



But I digress. The linking sites (which I have dubbed "leeching sites") are getting quite popular but at this time there is no evidence that they and other online pirate sites account for 40% of the losses to the industry, a statistic attributed to the MPAA in the NY Times article but unfortunately not a statistic provided by the MPAA or available to my knowledge in any reliable report. I went on a leeching site called Surfthechannel the last two days since it has a high Alexa rating and seems to be causing a stir. I was able to watch a very good copy of last week's "Big Love" episode, which I can get anyway from TW OnDemand at home. I also watched about a half hour of a good copy of the Reader which I had to watch that long to determine it came from an Academy screener. (wink wink) Then I got a message about an hour later on my computer that I had a trojan horse virus. I called IT and he said I was the third to report it but not to worry, no biggie. About 10 minutes later the IT guy called me to tell me to shut down from the network immediately because the virus was spreading like wildfire (his words not mine). Moments later, the IT police showed up at my door to collect my laptop to clean off the virus. Even though I was doing my job by looking at the leeching site, I got guilty (damn that Catholic upbringing) that maybe I was the source of the virus. The leeching site connected to Megavideo which is the source of a lot of full length pirate motion pictures but you can't find them unless you go through a leeching site. I hope my research did not cause my network server to crash. All I know is that I got an afternoon without the distraction of my computer and my email and I was able to clean up my desk and do a little reading for a change. What a treat!



I think I will try to go to the theater later today to see the rest of the Reader.

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