MPAA gets knocked down a few notches by the Norwegian Police

Norweigan Police Deal Massive Blow to MPAA Lawyer - link. Basically, the MPAA lawyer was shut down by the Norweigan government on his quest to make illegal file sharing, well... illegal. The Norweigans joined Canada "in a growing group of common-sense countries which refuse to waste public resources on petty file-sharers." Good for them...

Every week, I bring up something on P2P filesharing, but I do it with good reason. Following the WGA strike, there is one conclusion we can come to... and that's that the internet has value, or WILL have value, when it comes to motion picture and television content. What we don't know is where that value is going to come from. The people who made the content (the studios) aren't just going to give it away for nothing... and the consumers aren't going to pay for something that they can already get for free through P2P sites. Is the answer streaming video with banner ads? Do we do the iTunes model and charge per download? Maybe we should do membership fees with unlimited downloading like Netflix? Who knows... but I'm the type of guy that thinks if we deregulate the whole system, we'll figure it out. The more we try to regulate, the more people will try to fight it. We, as indie filmmakers and indie film distributors, will figure it out... we have to. The current system isn't getting indie filmmakers the money or recognition they deserve, but this new frontier just might. We may try a few different ways here and there, but with each failure, we'll be one step closer to the solution... and the solution to making money off of content on the internet will come out of the indie film world, I guarantee it. It will because it has to.

What worked 50 years ago, when you could just cram media down the public's throat, does not work anymore, we have to much choice now. We want to cram our own media down our own throats and we'll do it when we want to, on our own time. You only have to look as far as the music industry and iTune's success to see that a downloading system can be put in place and work, but maybe that won't work for film.... but let us figure that out on our own... and we will figure it out.