Ideas want to be free, man!

The MPAA has said that stronger DRM stuff is good for the movie industry, and therefore is good for consumers (link, .pdf). I'm not entirely clear on how it's better for us consumers, but that very much reminds me of the training videos at the Major Movie Theater Chain where I once worked: We want the customers to be happy, because if they customers are happy, the stockholders are happy. It all comes down to money, only, so often, the customers being happy doesn't actually make the stockholders happy. Customers want a good product (insert cheap shot about the quality of movies here) for a cheap pricewhile the major investors and corporate executives want more money. (Which, let me just say, did not give this freshly-hired wage-slave warm fuzzies, because, seriously: when you're in the final hour of a 9-hour shift at $6.25/hr, the last thing you're worrying about is how happy a guy who spends more in a day then you make in a year is.)

In related news, TorrentSpy is telling the courts that they're like Google for Torrents. If TorrentSpy is criminal in allowing people to search for torrents, so is Google, and Yahoo!, and every other search engine out there. It's a very good point: the good folks at TorrentSpy aren't hosting the Torrents, they're not ripping DVDs themselves, and they're not stripping DRM stuff off anything. They're just a portal.

The day we criminalize making information accessible is the day that I give up entirely on the United States.