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Companies Coming Around To Piracy's Upside?
traycerb writes "The Economist has an article detailing how numerous companies are finding piracy's silver lining: 'Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there. Having initially been reluctant to be seen exploiting this information, record companies are now making use of it. This month BigChampagne, the main music-data analyser, is extending its monitoring service to pirated video, too.' The kicker is Microsoft's tacit endorsement of Windows piracy in developing markets, namely China. The big man himself, Bill Gates, says it best in an interview with Fortune last year: 'It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.'"
"Nine Inch Nails gave out their new album (The Slip) for free and used the geographic data from the torrent downloads to plan their tour schedule."
Many (most?) martial arts have a concept called "Conservation of Motion", which allows for the famous notion of using your opponent's strength to your advantage by applying a small direction force to guide his body which is already in motion. When applied correctly, it's a thing of beauty. While most in the music industry are trying to use brute force to stop illegal copying, some are apparently using the massive momentum behind that copying to their advantage. I'd say NiN moved up a belt color.