A step in the right direction
I check out file sharing news daily and today I came across this article that both ticked me off and gave me pleasant surprise. NBC has joined with several other big names to provide legal movie and TV shows to watch for free. What is this little experiment" Hulu.com. I spent some time checking it out and while they have not loaded all the complete seasons for a lot of the shows, I do see a good beginning and would actually like to see something like this succeed. I am actually watching The Riches right now. I even found the first season of WKRP, the move The Usual Suspects and my favorite skit of all time, Homey the Clown.
I see this a step in the right direction to curb piracy. Piracy will never go away. It has been around since we figured out how to record music and video. It will still be around long after we are gone. However I do like the idea of the big boys starting to put the content out themselves and doing it for free. Granted you still have to put up with some commercials but it really is a small price to pay. They make their money off the commercials to fund the site so we can watch for free. I signed up and I am looking forward to spending some time watching some of my old favorites like the original Addams Family.
Again the site really is not complete with all episodes but like I said it is a good start and I will actually support this to help keep the law suits down and keep pressure off ISP's to invade our privacy by analyzing every packet that travels on their service which is what some people are calling for. They insist it is the ISP's responsibility to monitor for illegal downloads. Even though there are many legal downloads available through the torrent system it is widely pushed as fact that most Bit Torrent traffic is pirated content moving through the wonderful web. I am not in favor of having any ISP monitoring mine or anyone else's traffic. We have right to privacy and if the big boys are going to play ball and invest in sites like this then I am willing to meet them halfway.