Moore's Laws

Michael Moore's films are great. Sure, some people could argue that the facts are not completely true, and that his films tend to be somewhat sensationalist. But one thing we can learn from the Americans (despite all their numerous flaws) is that an outspoken journalist like him can actually voice his opinions. He has lots of opponents, who have websites such as moorewatch.com. Without leaning one way or the other, I think that it's important that we have a healthy intellectual environment where free-thinking and free-speaking journalists can go head-to-head and provoke the masses into some thinking of their own.

I'm sure everyone's read something or the other about the RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America) and its move to combat file sharing. They've done things like sue a 6-year-old girl and her single mother, a little boy and his grandmother, campuses full of college students, and basically anybody who cannot afford a hotshot lawyer to defend themselves. To sum it up, these guys act like vultures preying on the weak. These guys don't really experience serious losses in any way, and if they were serious about pushing up their sales, they could drop prices and see the effect. Oh, just so you know, the RIAA is not some ghost organisation that does all these evil things - it's a consortium, whose members are Sony, EMI, Warner, and Universal. They would have you believe that for every movie you steal, another underpaid Hollywood star or impoverished Sony executive starves to death. The truth is somewhere in the middle - it's bad to steal movies, but they can fix it by a) getting rid of the obscenely high prices of media (movies/music), b) getting rid of region codes, proprietary media formats (I hate Sony), DRM, and c) basically try to not be the greedy bastards that they are.

How does Michael Moore fit in here? Well, I saw a two-minute snippet of an interview with him on file sharing and movie stealing. I'm not really pasting from a transcript, but he said something to this effect. "Movie sharing? Well, meaning what happens if you buy a DVD of my movie and give it to your friend, who sees it without me making any money from it? That's called sharing, and it's been happening for a long time now for lots of things, not just movies. I do quite well, and I don't think I'd mind that - it's just sharing, something we've been doing for a long time. So long as you don't sell my movie again for a profit, I don't think that's bad." He may be controversial, but there are things you gotta learn from the guy.