Schwarzenegger Kicks Off Far East Tour

Arnold is visiting Asia to discourage people from pirating software and DVD movies. These are two major sources of income to California. Unfortunately, piracy is a major source of income to Asia too. This is part of an anti-piracy campaign that will feature both Arnold and Jackie Chan. I think it would be interesting to see how much piracy would decrease if Arnold and Jackie were to personally hunt down piraters and physically beat them.

Seriously though, anti-piracy campaigns have been a bit of a disaster. They are fining or arresting children and senior citizens, which really is terrible for publicity. Who wants to see big corporations going after 12-year-olds for music or movie piracy. It's just terrible!

Here's my two cents... the movies that Hollywood are releasing suck. I'm sorry, but they are absolute garbage. The real crime is that movie-goers have not starting suing the movie industry. Instead of villianizing the movie fans, the movie-makers should start making better movies. If they want our money for movie tickets or DVD's, then they have to release a product that is respectable enough to buy. I don't know anyone who wants a pirated copy of LOTR. Most of my friends own a legitimate copy of it. Hollywood has to set the bar higher, and we will buy.

As for the music industry, it hasn't accepted the fact that their industry has already undergone a paradigm shift. CD's are out, and MP3's are in. They have to re-model their industry, or be left in the dust. Special thanks to the iPod for really bringing the MP3 out into the popular mainstream. There were MP3 players before the iPod, but when the iPod came out, it really popularized and legitimized the MP3 as an audio format.

This is something that some corporations have forgotten. Consumers ultimately control industry. It doesn't show so much, now that marketing and advertising does a good job of telling people what they want to buy, but in the end it's still the consumer that decides what to buy and what's in demand.