See what Spotify did for the music world. Even though being only a streaming service it is only a partial replacement for local music, their business model makes sense. I downloaded pirated music to check it out, see if I liked it enough to buy a record or visit a concert. Since I’ve been a Spotify Premium member, my pirated music downloads dropped from about 20 albums a month to maybe 5 a year (ones I can’t find on Spotify, mostly).

Compare that to the movie business. You get to *rent* digital movies, on a *per-movie* basis for a bloody third of the price that it would cost you to buy the damn DVD. And even if you get to download them, you get a stupid botched-up copy that doesn’t play in any decent video players, you can’t copy to your tablet to watch on the go, you can’t convert to a different format for a special device, doesn’t play if your Internet connection goes down, and will never play again if (when) the vendor you bought it from goes out of business, or simply decides to no longer do business with you. And I’m supposed to freaking *pay* for that privilege?

The industry organisations better have a long hard think about what legal alternative they think they’re offering. They still don’t seem to be able to offer for payment what others offer for free. THAT might be a clear indication: the fact that even if their legal sites were free, and the pirate sites would charge their prices, I would *still* go with the pirate sites every time because the quality of their product is just so much higher.

My suggestion would be, as soon as you go to court, the legal process will be seen through no matter what. There should be no possibility for the suing party to go “wait, I’ve changed my mind” (while already having wasted taxpayer’s money) or the sued party to go “have a little cash and let’s forget about this”. If you ask the courts for a ruling, you *will* get that ruling, and it *will* be binding. This would encourage parties to think really long and hard about whether their claim is justified before invoking the courts, and hence deter abuse of the legal system.

Federal Reserve claims to own “billions” of bricks of gold that doesn’t exist and is currently more than the entire Earth has times a lot.