[Bradford] Fwd: Don't let the MPAA buy the Web

[Robert Burrell Donkin]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 8:15 PM, David Spencer
<baildon.research at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Though slightly less dramatically engaging, I suspect that the MPAA
>> has just been trying (without great success) to make money, and
>> attempts to gain influence over people's lives is merely a side
>> effect...
>
> Well, that's interesting.  Let us compare the MPAA with that pillar of
> the community Wernher von Braun, who was trying (with some success) to
> make nice rockets, and smoking death craters in and around London was
> merely a side effect. Is excellence in engineering sufficiently
> morally better than greed, such that it wipes out (like a sort of
> moral carbon offset) the greater evil of dead civilians over the
> lesser evil of imprisoned entrepreneurs?

For me, competence makes all the difference

I'd say that MPAA is more like Kim Ill Jong in Team America: World
Police - sort-of-scary random-collateral-damage-threat so long as
you're not the target

At least Wernher focused on his core business of building nice
rockets. Had Hitler employed the MPAA to level London, they would
probably still be fighting some obscure legal battle in the US courts
for compensation after the illegal destruction of the 3rd Reich...

A better - and more topical - analogy perhaps would be the Kaiser. Had
the Kaiser gone to the MPAA rather than the Schlieffen Plan and the
excellent Prussian (German) General Staff, then I suspect that rather
than a Lovely War the MPAA would still today be funding legislation
and fighting unorthodox and unconventional court actions aimed at
ensuring fees from performances of Back, Beethoven, Haydn and Handel
were payed to the greater glory of Germany...

Robert