isohunt is down, MPAA wins lawsuit
I just found out today, that isohunt is down. Apparently it's been down since october 22nd. From what I read on a news site, the Canadian owner Gary Fung lost the lawsuit against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). He's been ordered to pay a fine of 115 million dollars. That doesn't strike me exactly as a fair or moderate fine.
I can remember having downloaded a torrent from this site 6 years ago, when I wanted to download a book about PHP programming. If it wasn't for torrent sites, I would never have learned PHP in the first place. If I had been forced to buy the book in a bookshop, I probably would not have taken the risk to learn PHP. So to me there is definitely something to be said about the spread of information. Apparently this lawsuit of the MPAA versus Gary Fung has been going on for 7 years now. I hadn't realised that until today, when I read that article. I never did download a video via torrent sites, can't seem to find the point in it, to fill up your harddisk, when you have things like youtube.
It seems such a hollow victory for MPAA. There are a lot of alternative ways to pirate movies. Loads of other other torrent sites to be found, not to mention that it's relatively easy these days to burn a copy of a DVD. That in itself makes me think, that this lawsuit seems more like a medieval witchhunt and Gary Fung a scapegoat, being put into ruinous debt by Hollywood establishment.
What I also don't get is the supposed argument of these hollywood bosses, that they need to put a stop to these pirate sites. To me the argument that pirating movies costs Hollywood billions seems flawed on a micro-economic level. People download it because it is free, or because it is cheap. They seem to fail to understand the basic economic concept of price elasticity. And therefore in my opinion the Hollywood establishment seems to fail to understand their own market. If a product is expensive and demand elastic, people will not buy that product, period. It has nothing to do with piracy supposedly chafing of their profits. Ever since the nineties (and way before torrent sites) teens have been spending more and more of their money and a greater share of their purchase power on video games. In relative terms, it also means they've been spending less money on movies. In some countries total spending on video games has already surpassed total spending on movies.
