And since I'm blogging...

I find it extremely entertaining how my generation, me included, has absolutely no respect for copyrights whatsoever.

I realized this when I was on Youtube trying to find an episode of the office, but all of them had been taken off. I got really angry before I realized that technically it isn't legal for me to be watching copyrighted material on Youtube, anyways. It belongs to someone else. But I'm so used to having everything right at my fingertips that I have the gall to actually get angry when I can't find any stolen material.

Wow.

However, with the wonderful Internet, there's absolutely no way companies can stop us from copyright infringement. Every time they find one contraband website, a new one pops up.

I think this would be an appropriate time for companies to start saying, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

If they would just post all of their episodes online for free on their own website, they would have control over their material and could still advertise and all that jazz. If the official website's right there, why would I waste brain/finger power on looking for another viewing spot?

And it wouldn't hurt their DVD sales, either, because people who buy season DVDs of the Office don't buy them because they want to watch one episode every few months; they buy them because they want easy access to their show on a nice big television screen with all of the extras and deleted scenes and other such goodies.

Same goes for music- have a few songs posted on the internet- not for downloading, just for streaming- to satisfy your casual listener, and then promote albums and such so that more serious fans can go buy them. You could also make a tidy bundle off of sound advertisements that play every few songs.

So, oxymoronically enough, the solution to internet piracy is actually to post more free stuff. Who knew?