There's nothing (by law) to prevent artists from selling their work directly. The internet has made it absurdly easy to market, contact stores, make phone calls... everything the middlemen can do, and the overhead and setup costs are low enough that about 80% of the population in the US can set it up and do it full time without ever even leaving their basement, if they're so inclined.

Now if they want to hire someone to do that for them, hey, whatever --that's how a free market should work. Right now, there is no free market: It's sucking a sugar coated fuck off the record labels, or hawk it on the street since no store, movie theatre, or any other venue, will help you as required by contract. Break the monopoly, and you'll quickly see that the middlemen here suck most of the juice out and leave the artists with a shiny fraction of of the sale price, and the consumer gets a designed-for-obsolesence product with the shredded remains of fair use law, and their tears drizzled over the top for that crunchy freshly-raped texture.

But that's just it: They will never release a product that has broad consumer appeal. If they had DRM that used signatures instead of encrypting it, only allowing playback on certain devices, with an internet connection that's always on, etc., they'd have a lot better sell rate. But the truth is, the product is overpriced and heavily restricted to the point of being useless. If I could make a 1 time payment and get a license to watch A Movie(tm), and to play it anywhere, anytime, on any equipment, in any format -- for personal use... I'd do it if the price was reasonable. But that's the hideous evil about their marketing: They'll never give you that kind of a license. That's what you were buying in the 80s, and since we've gone digital, it's easy to create the extended edition, directors cut, ultimate, super, 1.5 version, diddledodedo edition -- and then we're going to release it on vhs, itunes, dvd, bluray, youtube, netflix, and in 23 different regions, at different times and price points... and you're going to have to PAY PAY PAY if you want to use any of them. Who cares if you already bought it and it's sitting on the shelf -- fuck you, you have to buy a slightly different version just to use it on your new streaming internet player, plus pay your ISP to stream it, plus pay the stream provider, along with the cost of the equipment, oh -- and every time you pay, we're right there, mouths wide, waiting to take a bite out of everyone else's sandwich.

I'm a pirate and proud of it. Because I'm not just doing it because I can, but because there's no other choice. The business model is corrupt, it doesn't serve the public interest, nor does it serve the artists interests, nor does it really even serve the industry as a whole; It serves about 150 people who are middle men for a dying industry. The only reason bluray has any traction at all is because our internet connections are shit and we can't download it or stream it on demand. There's no reason for optical drives anymore; even mechanical hard drives are going the way of the dodo bird. But these guys are pushing their distribution model onto the world and passing laws and crap thinking it's going to save them. It's just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Bitches, ship's going down -- and the pirates already hopped in a life boat, cast off, lit a big fatty.. and now they're waiting for the artists and wondering what'll happen to those poor bastard consumers in 'economy'.

RIAA and the MPAA are middle men. Middle men don't add value: They don't produce the product, and they don't use it. They're worthless. Fuck them. Get the consumers to the life boats (teach them how to torrent and bypass torrent blocking), and let the artists and the middle men figure out whether they want to drown together in each other's cold, unfeeling arms, or get on the goddamn boats and end this crap.

I meant that I can't believe this is news because I assumed people had been doing this for years.

It seems to me that the first thing the most oppressive governments do is to round up every able bodied man they can find and put a gun in their hands.

I thought science was about observation and describing what already exists.

Do you have a time machine? I'm sorry, I can't even prove that a second ago existed. The past is as remote as the future. I *can* say data in the present seems to support the idea that this universe has existed for more than 10,000 years, but I have no proof that the whole damn thing isn't an illusion thought up by a sadistic God to try to fool us into damning ourselves.

"and not be swayed by fear of authority figures."

Every atheist I've ever known refers to authority figures, usually by quoting the logical fallacy of appeal to authority without realizing that the entire concept of a logical fallacy depends on an authority figure.

Got a time machine then? I mean, I'm no YECer myself believing more in Theistic Evolution (evolution as God's engineering methodology, as opposed to Intelligent Design, I'm a software designer myself and I know very little intelligence goes into anybody's design), but even I have to admit that absent a written historical record from 11,000 years ago, I can't actively disprove YEC. I'm pretty sure we have good evidence that is far older than that; BUT absent a time machine, I can't rule out that evidence being created as is 10,000 years ago.

I just find it awfully strange that it would be.

Actually, I usually find that Atheists have a much worse understanding of science and don't understand why science can't disprove God (one big reason being that science is based on OBSERVATION, and you can't observe a lack of something).

Test it and see... it's not a "maybe" type of thing. If you use Access in a virtualized environment between multiple people, it WILL corrupt. I suspect it's related to clock syncing errors between the various clients.