Hacked off

The Pirates Can't Be Stopped

A teenager hacked into the outfit charged with protecting companies like Sony, Universal, and Activision from online piracy—the most daring exploit yet in the escalating war between fans and corporate giants. Guess which side is winning.

"In the beginning, I had no motivation against Monkey Defenders," Ethan tells me. "It wasn't like, 'I want to hack those bastards.' But then I found something, and the good nature in me said, These guys are not right. I'm going to destroy them." And so he set out to do just that: a teenager, operating on a dated computer, taking on—when his schedule allowed—one of the entertainment world's best technological defenses against downloading. The U.S. movie industry estimates that it loses more than $2 billion a year to file sharers; the record industry, another $3.7 billion. "Piracy," intoned Dan Glickman, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America trade group, to Congress in late 2006, "is the greatest obstacle the film industry currently faces." Instead of figuring out whether there is a way to make online distribution work—to profit from downloading—the industry has obsessed for years with battling it. Yet it took only a few months for Ethan to expose just how quixotic that fight has become.

These corporate guys are morons. There are tens of thousands of high-school kids out there that will outsmart these idiots every time. But the really shitty thing about these media coporations is the hypocrisy. They prattle on about theft when, of course, between ripping off the customer and short changing the artists, they are the biggest fucking crooks around.
This is Ian McLagan of The Small Faces:

Since the band broke up our records have sold consistently, and we'd all be rich boys today if the record industry wasn't even more corrupt than politics. Apparently, if you want to get paid in this line of work you have to sue, which means you have to be rich in the first place. It's a sad fact that Steve Marriott never saw a penny of his hard-earned dosh from Decca Records, the company that pissed and moaned about paying us a decent royalty, and in spite of not paying us at all between 1965 and 1991.

And it's taken the screenwriters three months of striking to get a measly 2% of the money generated in online sales of their work from those greedy bastards. The sooner these media dinosaurs become extinct the better for everyone, artists and consumers alike.