[pIp83Uns]

i stopped at this part to add a comment

"the film industry is also in trouble, which is why every dvd you rent now tries to guilt you into not stealing movies."

youtube, is probably the single biggest provable enabler that i've seen for this allowing people to willfully upload, in sequential ten minute segments, entire major motion pictures.

for example a guy from canada, that bastion of anti-western piracy, has a dustin hoffman movie (and others) on his youtube site, which you'd think is a totally illegal act and would bring the crushing might of hollywood lawyers down upon him (and google for allowing him to do so like they did with napster).

he had to use an email addy to sign up and so they can trace him down right, like the recording industry did with those college students and little old ladies who downloaded mp3's? you'd think that offering 'illegal' material for anyone to watch would at least get him suspended from google, but no, and he's nice enough to rotate his fare too, last week he had the first two cube movies (cube and hypercube, now it's cube zero.
thousands of people watched each clip of these hollywood movies, which google conveniently strings together for you to watch the entire movie, without commercial interruption, one ten minute seggy at a time.

he last logged on 9 hrs ago (at the time of this writing) and has been on that account since june and somehow i doubt i stumbled upon the only blatant pirate there.

no, the answer has to be either hollywood doesn't care, can't do anything about it or there are just so many pirates on major corporate sites like youtube that it's impossible to stop all of them. perhaps the guy is actually in hollywood and 'immune'.

but, and here's what i actually think is going on, people are so bored with the same old stuff from hollywood that they hope to get people interested in their type of passive entertainment by allowing it to be pirated in an act of desperation on their part.