I found 3 articles that piqued my interest, so I wanted to talk about them all in this post. As a result, this post may get rather long, so consider yourself warned. Be patient; it'll be fine.
This article (Ben Hardwidge, bit-tech.net) proposes, counter to the numerous death knells of PC gaming, that console gaming will be the first to die.
I agree with the premise and the numbers. All of the console manufacturers are bleeding money, mainly from their current console divisions. What is most telling is that the best selling console for each month of the last few years has been the PS2 (not the PS3); while the PS3 has been the loser (saleswise) of every month since its introduction (I think).
From my own perspective, I find console gaming not to be very fun unless other people are over. I have a PS2, but again, I only play with other friends. The same goes for these friends who have newer systems like the XBox360 (and XBox Live). PC gaming is simply more conducive to single player gaming than consoles are. That's why I'm not getting a new system of any kind to "keep up"; it'll be a waste.
The next article (Robert Silberman, Economic Times - India Times) deals with Microsoft against copyright infringers.
Microsoft brought its case against 4 infringers to Delhi in order to wield more influence on the decision; it simultaneously harassed the defendants even though they were still innocent.
In response, the Supreme Court of India ruled that Microsoft, having offices in the respective cities of the defendants, had to bring the cases there. Furthermore, the company had to compensate these defendants as well as pay other fines for misconduct.
In an era where more and more politicians are bought off by large companies and Microsoft goes virtually unchallenged in the US, it's nice to see a judge like this stand up against Microsoft.
The final article talks about Hollywood's record revenues for 2009.
I think the article hits the nail on the head in every way.
Despite the repeated whining by the MPAA about the industry being torn to pieces by piracy, the truth is that this myth is being torn to pieces by these numbers.
What's even more outrageous is that an industry executive of some sort tried to spin it in a negative light, calling it the "only" bright spot of the year while trying to maintain the myth of dark times for Hollywood because of piracy.
The last part of the article is right too. While the movie can be downloaded off of the Internet, they aren't really an adequate substitute for a real [possibly at-home, on-TV] theater experience. What downloading the movie then does is expose others to the movie, making them want to watch the real deal in the theater or rent/buy it on DVD. This is also true of music, when music recordings are distributed freely, live concert sales (the big revenue maker for the artist, much bigger than record sales) shoot up.
It basically proves that all the media industries and lobbies are after with copyright is total control over their works, not protection of any kind for the artists.
