Thursday, March 05, 2015

Why we love to hate the entertainment industry

The entertainment industry is suing Bredbandsbolaget, the Swedish ISP, over refusing to block The Pirate Bay. The trial is set for October 23, 2015, in Stockholm.

Bredbandsbolaget has a compelling argument: “It is an important principle that Internet providers of Internet infrastructure shall not be held responsible for the content that is transported over the Internet. In the same way that the Post should not meddle in what people write in the letter or where people send letters”. From the article it is not clear what the entertainment industry's fundamental argument is, beyond The Pirate Bay being illegal.

Why do we 'love to hate' the entertainment industry anyway?
  • The industry is completely commercialised. Unhampered by any originality whatsoever, more of the same is produced, resulting in a global mass of morons. There is no internal urge to create, there is just the urge to produce crap that all the morons of the earth want to consume.
  • They have been forcing even worse junk upon ignorant consumers in the form of lousy 'b-sides', album fill-ups and worthless sequels and prequels.
  • They claim to have an important role in safeguarding diversity and funding upcoming stars, but in fact they are very bad at that. Only one in 10 movies reaches break-even.
  • Remember the days of PolyGram, runs by overpaid windbags. And not just PolyGram.
  • They have been overcharging for ages, when sales were focused on physical formats.
  • They have completely missed the distribution technology evolution away from physical to file-sharing, downloads and streaming. In this respect, they are totally responsible for creating piracy in the first place.
In short, unless they come up with a compelling argument, and unless they start to put creativity before money again, we passionately support Bredbandsbolaget.