…  The movie theatres have to charge excessively on food and drinks to make any decent profit.  The “Movie companies” keep something like 90% of the profits during the opening week, when the movies make most of their money, then slowly, over the next few weeks, give a higher percentage to the theatres.  A theatre keeping 10% of the ticket price, along with the fact that they have to pay for the rights to the movies they feature, means that theatres have to charge outrageous prices for popcorn, just to stay in business.  Also,Movie Companies have no authority to dictate those prices.

Also, the poor chaps get *only* 1 million f*ckin’ USD a year? Compare to that to my salary and I’m weeping rivers.

F*CK THEM, and F*CK the MAFIAA! They can rot in Hell for all I care.

Nah… that would require studio executives who could actually think.

Now we must think about the MPAA losing their jobs…. PIRATE ALL THE THINGS.

The entertainment industry’s business model has for centuries been, at its core, providing exclusive experiences and collecting rents.  Seriously.  That’s all they know.  The decades of wax cylinders and successor technologies have merely served an extension of this exclusion, allowing others the tools to create exclusive experiences, for a fee.  Even the gawdawful unlistenability of boy/girl bands is an extension of the exclusionary principle: nursery music gratuitously differentiated (exclusive) for that cohort, prepackaged and carefully branded as rebellion for teens and tweens.

With exclusion being the basis of their business model, and technology impairing their ability to exclude faster than improving it, they are facing institutional obsolescence.  Therefore, in their own eyes and in the eyes of an elite that consistently acts to privilege incumbent wealth, every dirty trick of theirs is justified as self-defense.  Hence such tactics as the invention of exclusive “broadcast rights”, fishing subpoenae, MegaUpload, and Internet censorship/surveillance initiatives.  Whether or not these tactics are ethical or moral doesn’t matter: they work and they have the support of law.

So the industry doesn’t care whether customers walk out the door.  As long as non-customers don’t receive the benefit of the experiences they’re not buying, their mission is accomplished.  For the regime’s part, any person or organization that can justify any increase in surveillance (e.g. patrolling for criminalized copyright infringement) and control (e.g. anti-populist propaganda propaganda) over their subjects and is so well poised to provide it is a valuable ally or even partner to a regime that’s lost its popular legitimacy and whose survival depends on those capabilities.

See, it’s going to get much worse before it gets better.