I have two fundamental problems with this. The first is that this ruling flies in the face of “safe harbor” concepts that most law contains (including Swedish law, as I understand it) and these men are being prosecuted for providing to what amounts to a search engine, they did not host any of this “illegal” content in the first place. It’s a short trip down a slippery slope to lawsuits against ISPs for providing the bandwidth that allowed the download to happen and against the companies that provided the software that encoded to media that made the files small enough that moving them became practical. It’s the same reason I’m against outlawing guns. Outlawing something, particularly something useful, because it can be used to cause harm is stupid. It only punishes people who want to obey the law, and has no impact whatsoever on people who would be using those tools for doing something that was already illegal. What’s next? Outlawing hatchets because you can murder someone with them? Outlawing telescopes because you can peep on someone with them? If someone wants to do those things, they will find a way to acquire the tools they need to get it done, via legal means or not.

The second problem I have with this is that the “illegalness” of the content they “provided access to” is debatable. It arguably falls under a “fair use” -like umbrella, particularly according to Swedish law. Again, that is only if I understand it correctly, but it’s totally possible I’m wrong. And the “damages” are completely imaginary, predicated on the assumption that “unauthorized downloads = lost sales”, which they don’t. The whole thing just smacks of the judge either getting paid off or buckling under political pressure.

In the end, it’s just more collateral damage as the behemoth that is old media goes through it’s death throes. Your back is broken, you no longer control distribution. You don’t get to have all the eggs in your basket anymore. Since you refuse to evolve, just fucking die already. Content is effectively free now, and no number of legal “victories” will change that. Quit treating your customers like criminals and give them a reason to pay you, and you might still survive.

The short they did before hand, “Presto”, was fantastic as well. I have a weakness for Pixar shorts (Ask Liz about what happened when she, Sarah, and I went and saw… something I can’t remember what it was, but it was preceded by “For the Birds”.) so my opinion is probably biased.

Also, I ran 4 miles today. That’s a new distance record for me. My previous best is 5k (3.1-ish miles) I did it in about 52 minutes. Only 4 minutes faster and I’d be on pace for my “5 miles in an hour” goal. I’m pretty happy with that.

Birth wasn’t too great either. It has a cool premise, but it was overly arty and self-important, and Nicole Kidman’s character wasn’t very sympathetic. Rather than feeling bad for her or caring about her, I was just dumbfounded by how quickly an apparently stable and intelligent person could break so completely. It was well acted, and well shot, but something prevented me from being to suspend disbelief well enough to care. Maybe it was the overly long close ups on the character’s faces while they subtly battled with some internal conflict. I dunno, it left me decidedly “meh…”.