Home taping is providing lazy journalists and awful PR companies with income

When did the UK develop a sub-tropical climate? The Daily Mash provides sensible advice as usual, though I wish my house didn't have such enormous windows that make wandering around in the nude probably a criminal offence. I'm not even sure about these boxer shorts.

In other news, The Pirate Bay has been sold and the new owners are going to pay file-sharers to upload content - though this probably won't even cover what they pay to download it. It's highly likely that TPB will now go the way of Napster, i.e. fade into obscurity and only ever be mentioned again by geeks when discussing tech history, possibly with a small nostalgic sigh and a faraway look in their eyes. It's also further proof that every man has his price, though I do wish my price was £4.7 million.

If there's one thing the death of TPB doesn't signify, it's the end of media piracy. Rest assured, there will always be ways to get stuff illegally, and that applies to absolutely everything - drugs, guns, pornography, Absinthe, music (audio and sheet), software, TV, everything. People in China and Saudi Arabia manage it, how much easier do you think it is in the USA and UK? Also rest assured that home taping is not in fact killing music. The MPAA made $9.63 billion in 2007 purely from theatre ticket sales. Microsoft's net income after costs and taxes was $2.97 billon for the quarter ending March 31st this year - and that's after a 32% drop and in the midst of a global recession. Internet piracy is making a dent in these company's profits, but they're still so astronomical that I couldn't really care less. As for the anguished cries that loss of profit because of music piracy means record companies can't fund new artists, I say they recoup the losses by getting rid of some old artists we could happily do without.