Or maybe the same role that military contractors have to ensure that dodgy countries can't buy state-of-the-art weapons. It's not just a matter of principle, it's a matter of threat assessment. WPA-PSK today... tomorrow SSL? Yes, there are several orders of magnitude in difficulty between them, but EC2 is all about massive scalability, right?

The trouble is that these media companies have paid lots of money for the 'rights' to these media, for which they expect a return. The other trouble is that for every 'true' artist, like Neil Young, there will always be 100 artists who want all the riches for their 20 mins of inspiration. To my mind, the simplest approach is that all rights should be legally bound (non-transferable) to the creator. So artists *cannot* sell their souls, even if they wanted to. In this modern age, where media is cheap and distribution is easy (and traceable), there is no reason why merit & reward cannot remain with the originator. This way the big studios are reduced to their real role: marketing and PR. Which artists may choose to hire, if they have the resources. Exposure, in its fullest, most transparent sense.