I'm sure I've blogged about it at some point before, but I sincerely believe that the US media industry (particularly, the RIAA and MPAA - collectively the *AAs) have way too much lobbying power and are using their lawyers in substitution of adaptation.

This hilarious TED talk called 'Copyright Math' by Rob Reid just about sums the entire story up. They refuse to change their business plan to meet customer's new needs and then proceed blame any potential lost profits (which were determined based on outrageous projections to begin with) on rampant piracy online and copyright infringement.

Anyways, I'm blogging about his because I just saw this article on TorrentFreak: Student Fined For Running Movie & TV Show Subtitle Download Site. This student had a website where people could upload subtitle files that they themselves had translated, resulting in a movie subtitle database with translations for various local language dialects. Sounds great, even for the copyright owners, right? This community site is offering a way for people who would otherwise not be able to enjoy the movie to view and understand the movie. That means more people consuming the media and more (yes, legitimate) content buyers. That's more money in your pocket, *AAs.

The movie studio's reaction to this? Sue the site owner of course, even after he took it offline willingly.

Hey, *AAs, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. If people are turning away to other services, that's because yours is lacking something. If people are mass pirating your content, that's because the pirates gives a better user experience than the DRM, ad-encumbered media we paying customers have to deal with. And most importantly, if you cut off sites like these and don't cater to that user base, then you're just losing potential revenue. Stop blaming it on piracy. This one's entirely on you.

Edit: A Slashdot story linking to an article called Game of Thrones Crowned Most Pirated TV-Show of the Season just came in... Yet another great example of this concept. Game of Thrones is a excellent TV series but in order to watch it HBO mandates that not only do you subscribe to a cable subscription, but also that you buy HBO on that cable subscription. You cannot pay for HBO Go on its own, nor can you get the media from other digital distribution networks such as the iTunes Store until the next season starts and HBO releases the entire season to DVD/Blu-ray/online distributors (relevant: this Oatmeal comic). HBO's stance on things is that watching TV over the Internet is a "temporary phenomenon"... Yeah, sure.