Silly White House

Apparently The White House told the Swedish government the shutdown The Pirate Bay or suffer trade sanctions for not respecting US copyright.

Now all this is going to do is promote awareness of torrent portals so more people pirate copyrighted material. The big corporations had their chance to do something about piracy when it was all confined to Napster, but they made a mistake and now they are competing against illegal distribution for consumers.

I hope America sees sense to not declare another war. To go with The War on Drugs, The War on Terror and The War on Iraq etc. I actually find Americas use of language on these occasions to be quite interesting because they all use the same phrases.

Anyway if the US government really wants to help the movie and record industry they need to tell them to suck it up and be innovative with their distribution model. There will always be piracy and at the moment I believe it is the convenience factor that wins a lot of people over and not the fact that it is free. If for example when Madonna's new album is released consumers could go to a website pay a fee and then just download the album in whatever format or bitrate they wanted. That would be one up on the torrent portals for convenience, availability and giving customers what they want, how they want it. There is also Open Source DRM as a possibility, but I don't want to make this post any bigger and that is a big question-mark as it doesn't currently exist.