What about consuming Hollywood movies through legal, online means such as Amazon.com video? You'd still get to watch the movies while giving a vote to legal online streaming.
Well, your money still ends up in the MPAA's hands to be used for nefarious purposes.
I don't think the MPAA will stop no matter how successful online video services are, because they could always be making more, in their minds, if they only had "the tools" to stop online piracy. That these tools amount to sledgehammers that could, whether by accident or abuse of power, stop legitimate uses of the internet is not important to these people. This is what we are protesting.
Consuming their products either way, is just the same. The money ends up in their hands.
But for a boycott to be effective, you need to create awareness to generate real-world actions. Otherwise, only the tech-savvy ones will do something, and the boycott won't reach the scale needed.
Anyway, I don't believe that a boycott is a good alternative. That would hurt mostly to the weakest links of the chain; employees who work for little money, and the big companies won't hesitate to fire, if they feel the need to keep their numbers fine, just to don't make their shareholders angry.
Let's remember that we are in the middle of a nice tech-bubble here, most of us making some good money, but the rest of the economy is in really bad shape. I don't think this is a good time to push them to swell the ranks of the unemployed.
I'm having sort of a dilemma here... I have to meditate it a bit longer.
This argument reminds me of the way logging companies defend clear-cutting old-growth forests by simply saying that loggers need jobs. If your main concern is simply to preserve jobs, then it's never a good time to start a boycott.
If your main concern is defense of liberty, if I may be so bold, then now is most definitely an appropriate time to start a boycott.
This really is the most level headed and correct response IMHO. Hollywood is responding, not to the internet as a modality of speech, but to the rampant piracy of materials that legally makes them money - they are doing nothing wrong by providing that material for sale. Are they draconian about it? Sure. Are they not innovating? Sure. But it doesn't make them wrong and us right, what it means is that we (as internet citizens) need to promote the act of legitimate value exchange between consumers that are torrenting/downloading material and value creators. Hollywood never started this fight - this was started by people who found out that it costs almost nothing to copy a digital copy of a film or piece of music and put it up for download.
Do I think copyright and rights management are all kinds of messed up? Hell yes I do, but that's why it requires innovation FROM US; Hollywood will die off if we encroach using a legitimate business model - it sucks that it took this long for everyone to realize that Hollywood needs to be disrupted just like every other industry the technology industry has disrupted. I believe Amazon is having a go at it?
It really stinks that this whole thing has come down to us needing to defend our rights on the internet - but I can't help but feel that Hollywood's response is a leveled reaction to something many people are not respecting (that is, paying for the content).
The problem is two-fold here, Hollywood isn't innovating and internet citizenship is not being respectful. It has been Hollywood's shortcoming in not being able to figure out better ways of making content easier to access online over the pirated version; and people aren't respecting the boundaries (due to Hollywood's inability to innovatively respond to distribution on the internet) of fair economic trade in the digital medium.
These next two to five years will define both the internet and the entertainment industry for the next 50-100 years IMHO.
Except that the fight is not really about piracy. Piracy is just the strawman the RIAA/MPAA uses to grab the ear of politicians and unsuspecting members of the public.
The fight is really about control. The internet allows, for the first time, independent amateurs to command the same ability to create and distribute as the major media companies. And that scares them, it scares them immensely because it means that you just might not need them as gatekeeper and distributor. Which means that that will not remain attached to your wallet, receiving payment for all the content you consume from them.
I suspect Hollywood has problems with internet-distributed small time indie productions when their distribution costs are being subsidized by their file host, via ad revenue generated by providing downloads of pirated Hollywood movies.
If small-time indie productions can't afford to pay for their own bandwidth, maybe they need to fix their own business model.
I don't think the MPAA will stop no matter how successful online video services are, because they could always be making more, in their minds, if they only had "the tools" to stop online piracy. That these tools amount to sledgehammers that could, whether by accident or abuse of power, stop legitimate uses of the internet is not important to these people. This is what we are protesting.