Hey United States Government — I mean Hollywood, but really it’s a handful of mega-conglomerates calling the shots for both parties, isn’t it? Why else would the U.S. be so obsessed with monetizing intellectual property and masquerading worldwide DCMA-style copyright laws as international trade agreements?

But I digress.

How’s that war on terror drugs file sharing going? I see you’ve scored a couple of points over the weekend, all but shutting down isoHunt in the stars & stripes and even pulling the mighty Pirate Bay off the grid for a few precious moments. And all in advance of the series finale of LOST, the English-speaking world’s most anticipated old media download that you can’t quite figure out how to monetize until it comes out on DVD.

Well done. But have you checked your rear-view mirror lately?

Remember that DeBill you managed to get passed in the UK? That was awesome. But the three-strikes law in France? Not so much, huh? Seems that downloaders there have turned to other services, like RapidShare — which by the way has just scored a big legal precedent on your own soil. And while I don’t have the exact numbers handy, it seems that BitTorrent downloads of LOST might end up doing a little better than the sales of locked-down DRM-ridden files on AppleTV. Wonder what that’s all about…

I guess your seething hatred of BitTorrent comes from the fact that it represents a much more efficient means of distribution for long-form media like movies and TV. And it must really be a kick in the nuts that storytellers are realizing that they don’t need the so-called “expertise” of agents, lawyers, producers and distributors to get their work out in front of a vast international audience hungry for new ideas that aren’t sequels to re-imaginings of product placements for kids toys.

I bet you’d love to have BitTorrent outlawed altogether, if not for those damned commie Linux users and their free operating systems. You almost had them cornered with your proprietary video codec licensing — that is until Google came to their rescue with the announcement of a free alternative. Who’s side are they on, anyway?

Have you figured out yet that you no longer hold the keys to the world’s culture? That art is no longer a scarce resource, and that your shit movies and TV shows now have to compete with labours of love that talented, forward-thinking folks are making and making available for free, without having to worry about demographics and additional revenue streams?

Oh, you haven’t?

Well, this is awkward…