Quote: "I mean, why should people be allowed to re-broadcast material that people have paid a lot of money to produce. It's like saving all your money, buying a nice car, then having someone take a picture so they can tell people it's theres - claiming credit for other peoples work."
No doubt there are people who do literally rebroadcast everything. I will be the first to admit that I download films (illegally) or stream them. This is because a movie ticket now costs more than the bloody DVD and what's more I have to sit through half an hour of ads that I didn't pay to watch.
Here's the fundamental inconsistency: regular people are expected to adapt to the needs of private companies. Private companies, on the other hand, fail to adapt to the needs of the people. They aren't even expected to. It's not like the old days of capitalism where they would find a niche in the market and try to exploit it - the internet offers plenty of these niches. No, instead, they punish people for not giving them money the way they want it.
Governments are in no position to take sides in cases like this, but they do, because they benefit from it, and because companies send lobbyists to sway congress's opinions. A single lobbyist from a company has more power than a thousand voters combined.
The good thing about the internet is that it can never be fully regulated. People will find a way, one way or another. The longer it takes businesses to recognise this, the more money they're going to lose, and the more they're going to blame the people for it.
They need to find new ways of making business. They are operating a 20th century business model in the 21st century and they stand no chance of holding everyone back, because the internet is too organic and it naturally finds ways around everything.
Big companies (I will use News Corp as an example), don't even care how much they are hated by people. They use their leverage to make money anyway. Rupert Murdoch insists that people stop giving away news for free on the internet and that they start to charge for it. Websites are not newspapers, nobody's going to do that. I can't understand how someone so successful can't grasp how stupid that is. I also don't understand why they continue to destroy their reputation for the sake of money. They make enemies of everyone then run to Uncle Sam to take care of them - and he does.
"everyone forgets a semi-colon sometimes." - Phaelax
