Last night here in New Zealand there was a very interesting interview on Campbell Live* with Kim Dotcom the Megaupload founder & alleged Internet pirate.

It's about twenty minutes long, but well worth the watch.

Watch here**

*A New Zealand Current Affairs show.

**Click me.

Normally it's not but NZ is one of the little kids in the sandpit (The World) & wants to stay in the big kid's (USA's) good books & it doesn't get sand thrown at it by the USA.

Meanwhile 'up' here in .CA, we are faced with bill C-xx which gives certain 'chosen people' the right to pull info from any ISP without a warrant, in the name of law enforcement. 

SOPA and PIPA are dead.  The US Congress has a bad habit of passing laws that it doesn't read and doesn't understand - like Obamacare (but that's a different story).  SOPA and PIPA died because enough voters finally told Congress that they would be voted out of office if they passed.

I don't know if you're old enough to remember but we used to have things called "tapes" that could imperfectly store sound and moving images.  The music and film industries tried to have them banned and failed miserably.

So now we have torrents and avi's and dvd clones and the music and film industries are reverting to their witch hunt mentality.  We're losing billions!  Criminalize it!  They are even suing their own customers.  Anything is easier than coming up with a realistic business model:

They are not losing billions because people are copying things they never would have paid for in the first place.

Many people copy as a preview and end up buying the higher quality product.

It is often less hassle to download than to buy.  Some dvds won't allow you skip commercials.

DRM - don't even get me started.