Author’s note: The music industry has always been spectacularly club-footed when it comes to new technology and particularly music sharing. Their attempt to stop illegal downloads by offering a day of free downloads really worked well.
The music industry’s decision to launch a day of free music downloads met with spectacular success today after every group associated with music piracy agreed to give up their illegal activities immediately.
“It seemed pointless to go on,” explained Helmut Mechmech, spokesman for the KaZaA network of file sharing. “How can we be expected to compete against this kind of strategy? True we may have over 3 million users logged on at any one time sharing 3.5 million gigabytes of pirated material but how can that compare with a whole 24 hours to legally download as many Celene Dion tracks as you like? It’s just not fair”
Brad Barlett of rival network Morpheus agreed. “These guys really caught us on the hop. There we were getting ready to launch Morpheus version 3.0 with improved downloading times and easier searching when suddenly we’re faced with this” he sobbed. “What the Hell am I going to tell all my developers. Those guys have sweated night and day to get this software working. And what about the advertisers? There’s no way they could expect to make a bean after the music industry have done this”
However, Hilary Rosen of the Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA) explained she had no sympathy with the pirates. “If these guys seriously thought that we were just going to stand back and let millions of people listen to music without paying for it, they were seriously mistaken. The fact that that is exactly what we’ve done up to now was just a ploy to give us time while we prepared this killer blow to piracy. Combating free music downloads by giving people free music downloads has proved that we have the moral high ground and that these pirates are thieves who can never prosper. And our extensive advertising campaign in the US has also shown these guys who’s going to win this war!”
This was confirmed by Sven Swetland chief technology officer for Grokster “I was chastened by the advertisements in the US,” he explained. “Seeing Britney Spears comparing copying a file to bursting into a music store with a gun and spraying the customers with bullets before filling up a truck with CDs and setting fire to the store – that was a real powerful image. I now truly believe that what we do is a sin and we deserve to be punished for it. In fact, I am just gathering up my collection of 346 CD’s with convenient to store and manage MP3’s on them and taking myself to the police station. I’m demanding a custodial sentence at the very least. Anyway, I’m hoping that by administering this corrective action I may still be in with a chance of a screw with Britney.”
Sex and Drugs and Growing Old 