George Scriban’s been doing some great analysis of Viant’s scare-story about online movie “piracy” on his blog:

the Newsbytes headline is no big deal, though, when competitors like the San Jose Mercury News go to press with screamers like “Online film piracy cuts into industry profit: BOOTLEG COPIES BEING TRADED AT INTERNET SPEED”. naturally, the Merc (like the BBC and c|net before them) leads with the Big Scary Numbers but they go one further when they haul Jack Valenti — Big Content’s most richly-rewarded foghorn — out of cryosleep to proclaim that we are in the middle of what may (or may not) be the end of days: “It’s getting clear — alarmingly clear, I might add — that we are in the midst of the possibility of Armageddon.”

as an aside, i realize that “professional” journalists are supposed to avoid editorializing, but when Jack Valenti’s morbid neo-Ludditry has driven him to compare the VCR to the murder of women and the internet to the annihillation of life as we know it in a final battle between the forces of good and evil, shouldn’t someone suggest that Mr Valenti should plug the analog hole in his face?

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