This is an article from MTV.com, inadvertently noticed when chortling at the buffoon from Death Cab For Cutie who claims he’s being persecuted by the Man. It’s not as if I expected insightful and penetrating journalism from the online arm of that great engine of juvenile vapidity, but this is technical idiocy on a par with “They’re stealing the Internet!” Alec was going to write about this, but he determined that it would interfere with the necessary triangulation of the interests of large and small businesses to more fully enhance the moderating power of the vital center. You know, I’m getting worried about him — in the posting queue here at It Is *Dancing*, he has a ten-page article that consists entirely of the words “Thanks, Ralph.”

BitTorrent To Serve Up Fall Out Boy, ‘Harry Potter’ Legally

Imagine if, back in the day, record labels had said to Napster, “Sure, take our stuff,” instead of bringing down the big legal hammer and crushing the pioneering peer-to-peer service. Times have certainly changed.

It truly is a brave new world, in which media companies have recognized that distributing promotional material for free can increase their profits. Such an unprecedented revolution of media distribution is certainly worthy of note, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that BitTorrent, Inc. has a partnership itself with MTV. Why, that piece of information would suggest that the media business is an incestuous, oligopolic orgy of “co-opetition”. In fact, it’d suggest that the media industry is a sort of sodomistic Ouroboros, where titanic media conglomerates slurp each other off into increasingly staggering levels of profit.

Read more »