The popularity of SUVs is interesting to me, if nothing else as a testament to the power of marketing. The past dozen years or so have seen an endless flood of TV commercials depicting sociopathic individuals performing illegal (or at least antisocial) acts in their SUVs. Those ads successfully turned me off to the idea of ever owning one of the things (I'm a minivan owner myself, but then again I'm a pragmatic sort partial to, as you say, rational people moving vehicles.)
There was one ad that showed two skinny blonde suburban housewife-types in their giant machines approaching the sole remaining space in a parking lot. Both were shown as being very bad-tempered and irritable, and the camera cut back and forth between them to show the quickening tension as they neared their target. Finally, the apparent loser lost it completely and drove over the curb and up a grass-covered hill to get there first. To whom are they trying to sell these things, exactly? Terrorists? It's bad enough that people drive these things like weapons but do we really have to give them more ideas?
A number of other ads seem targeted to the arrogant yuppie personality. The one that lives for his car and his trophy wife and doesn't really have time for anyone or anything else. Basic courtesy is a foreign concept to these people because of their I COME FIRST philosophy. Frankly, I wish someone would take the automakers to court over the number of people that have died because of their (admittedly successful) marketing of powerful vehicles to nitwits. I know, I'm shifting responsibility away from the driver (where it belongs), but any way you slice it, the manufacturers put loaded guns in the hands of idiots. And they're still doing it, knowing full well that a significant portion of their customer base should never have been allowed to operate such vehicles. Or any motor vehicle, for that matter... it's just that SUVs make them that much more dangerous.
Yes indeed, just the kind of people I want sharing the road with me. The only bright spot in all this is that they kill themselves off at a higher rate than the rest of us do, which gives me hope that natural selection will eventually take care of the problem. I mean, I take the expressway twenty-five miles to work each way, and it's rare when I don't see at least twisted, mangled mass of charred metal and plastic that used to be an SUV.
That's okay; the Smart Fortwo only seats two people anyway (hence the name), so it can't carry soccor moms' "babies!"
Besides, the reason soccer moms drive those damn SUVs is that they are just as hooked on the feeling of power as any male driver: maybe more. They may say "It's for the children!" but that's unadulterated pure baloney. There are plenty of comparatively safe vehicles that don't require a V8, enclose enough space to serve as an aircraft hangar, and need a "WIDE LOAD" sign on the back.
If they cared about those babies (much less all the other women around them driving their babies) they'd drive their vehicles more safely. If they really cared they wouldn't have chosen an overpowered four-wheeled behemoth in the first place. Sure, our hypothetical soccer mom may be more likely to survive an accident in a Yukon... but if she plows through an Accord or a Neon somebody's still gonna die. Best not to have the accident in the first place, but that would require accepting some responsibility and actually learning how to drive. Frankly, given the poor track record of SUV drivers as a class, I think they should be required to obtain a CV license. What, that's too much trouble? Tough... get a minivan.
Regardless, cell phone usage should be treated the same way as any other potentially dangerous behavior: we'll trust you to know what you're doing until you screw up. Then we'll take it away from you until you learn your lesson. Pre-emptive banning and presumptive ticketing are punitive and paternal... much as I detest fools with clamshells glued to their heads I dislike my government assuming that I am one even more. And I really can't stand it when government bans specific behaviors with the express (albeit unstated) purpose of increasing ticket revenues.
Focusing on a single attribute of an overarching problem is typical behavior of politicians who either don't know how to deal with the issue, or know that they'll never convince the population to do what has to be done to fix it. Bad driving is becoming endemic to our society: cell phones contribute to that but they are not the root of the evil. Matter of fact, trying to fix this particular problem with laws and penalties is akin to trying to cure diarrhea by tinkering with your toilet.
The passenger is in the car with you can see things going on just as well as you can. So they're less likely to speak at inopportune times. They also tend to keep their own eyes on the road while speaking, so they can alert you if they see a danger that you don't
You've obviously never driven anywhere with the bunch I go to lunch with every day.
We are specializing: it's called "intellectual property law" and we're exporting it left and right. Of course, it doesn't do anyone any good except the human refuse at the top of our corporate food chain, but there it is. IP law sure as hell isn't going to provide for the people of this great nation either... only one thing will do that: industry.
The problem with the idea of "leaving bulk production" to another nation is that you just sacrificed your independence and control of your own future, because you are now an economic satellite of another power. That's not a good position for any country to be in. Bulk production is what feeds, clothes and houses your population, and any nation that is totally dependent on imports for those things is just asking for trouble. Our "captains of industry" (hah!) are currently hooked on cheap labor and import goods from China, the implicit assumption being that China can be trusted to continue doing business that way. Two things argue against that: one, China is not, after all, allied with the United States at any level and two, without the ability to create wealth we won't have any money to buy the stuff with anyway. At some point in the not too distant future we're going to wish we'd held on to our manufacturing base and the technical people who maintained it.
You have to realize one important fact: China has systematically stripped America of the heavy machine tools we spent a hundred years building, and collapsed the domestic industries that used them. A lot of it can't even be made anymore: the capital costs are too high. Big stamping presses, textile machines, all sorts of heavy equipment that we no longer know how to make have been sold off cheap to Japan and China. Some if it they are using for their own purposes, the rest they simply bought because they didn't want us to have it. So even if we wanted to become self-sufficient again we couldn't do it, not within any meaningful time frame. We are going to regret that.
Yes... I think something like an automatic sunset provision applied to all laws by default. Of course, as Congress proved with the Patriot Act that doesn't always guarantee that you'll get rid of something you don't want.
Would all those great shows like the Sopranos, Sex in the city, Deadwood, etc ever been possible had HBO been worrying whether or not they're hurting all of those beautiful minds in the heartland?
Certainly not, they'd have been too risky.
Matter of fact, this is just another example of a bunch of lawyers (i.e., Congress) creating a lot of makework. That's all this is: yet another Congressional subsidy to the corporate attorney crowd, as if Sarbanes-Oxley and intellectual property (hah!) weren't enough. We're at the point where no company can take a breath (much less create something worthwhile) without having to consult some lawyer and have him pass on the idea. Which he won't, with laws like this on the books, because if he did, he wouldn't be doing his job.
Regarding "decency" laws: what is it about certain people that they feel the need to force their pattern for living upon everyone else? I just want to grab one of these idiots by the throat, shake him a few times, and point out that I'M NOT OFFENDED BY A FEW BAD WORDS, YOU STUPID LITTLE PRICK, I PAY THE DAMN CABLE BILL NOT YOU, AND WORRYING ABOUT WHAT ME OR MY FUCKING KIDS SEE ON THE GODDAMN TELEVISION IS ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NONE OF YOUR GODDAMNED BUSINESS!
"Decency" laws my ass. What we need are laws that make Congress behave decently. I might go for that. But they'd fuck that up too, it's the nature of that particular collective beast. It really is twisted that some of the most amoral individuals in our society are the ones trying to define what is acceptable and "decent" (whatever that actually means) for the rest of us. Still, they do say that hierarchies are like septic tanks: the really big chunks always rise to the top.
And I'm sorry if any of you found this post to be "indecent" but sometimes Congress just torques me into a fucking pretzel. As Lewis Black says, "The only thing STUPIDER than a Republican or a Democrat... is when these little pricks work together!"
It's called "incrementalism". It's very effective because the majority don't realize it's happening, and those few that do are easily dismissed as paranoids and cranks. It's also been going on for a very long time.
Not necessarily. The only "recording" going on is a few kbytes of data temporarily buffered for analysis: if it is immediately discarded and never available to be listened to by a human, I doubt there'd be a problem. The RIAA tried to make a deal out of the temporary storage of music data in a satellite receiver as being a "recording" but that didn't fly either, if I remember correctly.
As I understand it, the telcos aren't common-carriers with regards to so-called "data services" anyway, so they can perfectly well get away with this. Granted the distinction between a voice service and a data service is technologically non-existent anymore, but from a legal perspective it's still very important (as it happens, I have AT&T's Callvantage VoIP service at home... which set of laws would apply to AT&T in the case?) That's part of the law that does need to be changed, I think.
Now, whether or not they'll have many customers when it's all over is another story. The moment my ISP starts making decisions for me about what I can and cannot download is the day I find another provider. If there aren't any other providers, then I'm going to drive to Washington, D.C. (probably none of us will be able to actually board aircraft at that point), grab Orrin Hatch and a few other select Congresspeople by their lapels and shake some sense into them.
What's amazing about this is the level of influence the media companies are able to wield, in both the government and private sectors. Honestly, they must have some part of their organization whose only job it is to dig up dirt on Congressmen and corporate CEOs. Otherwise I can't see why AT&T would just roll over on this.
We aren't talking about "organically-evolved law", the implication being that such laws evolved over a substantial amount of time and are so ingrained into a society that changing them causes significant disruption. We are talking about recent corruptions/subversions/perversions of organically-evolved law, and such things can be repealed. And they need to repealed soon, before they do become ingrained.
It never was what we thought it was... it's just that current technology makes it easier for the government voyeurs ^h^h^h^h^h^h^hagencies to poke around.
You forgot ESS. Yes, Bell Labs was responsible for a lot of groundbreaking stuff.
I have to say, though, I agree. There were a lot of legitimate complaints registered about the Bell System at the time, but customer support wasn't one of them. They had quality of service standards they had to live with, and by and large they did. I ran a good-sized multi-node BBS in the mid-to-late eighties (16 or so lines) and I have to tell you, the technical support I got from our local RBOC was stellar. They had a nominal charge of $40/quarter hour at the time, but I had a guy come out and install 18 phone lines at my home. He spent two days running cables around the place (because of the way the place was built he couldn't drill through the floors) and only charged me a hundred bucks. All solid, quality work, and the installer actually had considerable training in general electronics and telephone theory. Knew what he was talking about, let me tell you, and he told me that he got all that training from the company school. As an engineer myself, I was impressed. But hey, AT&T expected to be around and they expected their employees to stick around, and it was worth the investment. Hell, once he had it all in place he said, "you're gonna want at least one hunt group for this: if you have me set it up for you now it won't cost you anything." Cool.
Contrast that to what I've received from Comcast and SBC in the past fifteen years or so... shoddy work, ignorant installers that barely speak English, and when they're all said and done what I get is a ball of twisted pairs floating in midair over my basement floor without so much as a wire nut. Kind of a third-world flavor, really. Then they ARGUE with me when I try to tell them that they have ring and tip backwards or no, you have lines one and two reversed. Bare wires everywhere. I complained but the "technical support" people I spoke to couldn't understand me either and only cared about whether I had working phone service or not. So I had to go get a block and a punchdown tool and do it properly myself. And this for double what the old Bell System used to charge me every month (Comcast had me up to $95/month for two phone lines before I switched to VoIP.)
The reality is that presiding Judge Green (who was oh-so-concerned about unspecified additional "services" that weren't available to the consumer because of the AT&T monopoly) was just too impatient. The Internet came along and we got all those things anyway... what we lost was the world's most reliable phone system.
If you want to watch the RIAA start having real problems, you simply have to publicly and repeatedly associate them with abortion, or cute, furry animals, or any hot-button issue that has a militant wing. Maybe a bunch of wackos in pirate outfits would storm the place. Serve them right.
It's not a method to identify "pirates" (and I use the term very loosely here.) The MPAA has, so far, not implemented the RIAA model of suing the very people that like and use their products. Hopefully, they're too smart for that (not holding my breath though.) What they do want is a high-profile case such as this, to scare casual torrent users into not being torrent users. Same sort of thing the RIAA has done, and it will probably have about as much success in terms of reducing casual infringement.
I get the impression that these people just can't see another way, don't feel that we, as their customer base, have the right to demand another way. We do, as it happens. We don't want your product on the terms you are offering it. In the past, that would have meant we either did without, or the suppliers changed their product or way of doing business. Nowadays, we can make do with a reduced quality copy of your product whether you want us to or not. And you know what? That's good enough for most of us. The time may come when we all have the bandwidth to receive a full, unabridged, untranscoded version of your product. If you don't have a mechanism in place then to stop us (good luck with that) or a better way for us to buy your product, you're screwed.
So times change: they do, and it doesn't matter whether you want them to or not, doesn't matter whether copyright infringement on a massive scale is morally akin to murder (as some apparently believe.) Doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong. I liken the advent of downloading to driving on the expressway. Yeah, most of the people around me are idiots who drive too fast, or too slow, make gratuitous lane changes and other stupid and often illegal moves... but there are too many of them, I can't control them, and to ignore them would result in disaster. Consequently, I adjust my driving to avoid a bad outcome. The media companies are in the same boat with regards to their customer base, and at some level I think they realize that.
As their front organization is run by lawyers, however, it's not surprising that all of their proposed solutions involve the legal system.
Maybe, if you're an idiot and don't take the proper steps. For example, if you go through Tor or I2P or some other anonymizing network you should be okay. Matter of fact, I predict a huge spike in the size of such networks. Mark my words, folks, the term Onion Router is about to become part of the popular lexicon.
Slashdot Mirror
I pray you keep this madness confined to your own country!
It's way too late for that, I'm afraid.
The popularity of SUVs is interesting to me, if nothing else as a testament to the power of marketing. The past dozen years or so have seen an endless flood of TV commercials depicting sociopathic individuals performing illegal (or at least antisocial) acts in their SUVs. Those ads successfully turned me off to the idea of ever owning one of the things (I'm a minivan owner myself, but then again I'm a pragmatic sort partial to, as you say, rational people moving vehicles.)
... it's just that SUVs make them that much more dangerous.
There was one ad that showed two skinny blonde suburban housewife-types in their giant machines approaching the sole remaining space in a parking lot. Both were shown as being very bad-tempered and irritable, and the camera cut back and forth between them to show the quickening tension as they neared their target. Finally, the apparent loser lost it completely and drove over the curb and up a grass-covered hill to get there first. To whom are they trying to sell these things, exactly? Terrorists? It's bad enough that people drive these things like weapons but do we really have to give them more ideas?
A number of other ads seem targeted to the arrogant yuppie personality. The one that lives for his car and his trophy wife and doesn't really have time for anyone or anything else. Basic courtesy is a foreign concept to these people because of their I COME FIRST philosophy. Frankly, I wish someone would take the automakers to court over the number of people that have died because of their (admittedly successful) marketing of powerful vehicles to nitwits. I know, I'm shifting responsibility away from the driver (where it belongs), but any way you slice it, the manufacturers put loaded guns in the hands of idiots. And they're still doing it, knowing full well that a significant portion of their customer base should never have been allowed to operate such vehicles. Or any motor vehicle, for that matter
Yes indeed, just the kind of people I want sharing the road with me. The only bright spot in all this is that they kill themselves off at a higher rate than the rest of us do, which gives me hope that natural selection will eventually take care of the problem. I mean, I take the expressway twenty-five miles to work each way, and it's rare when I don't see at least twisted, mangled mass of charred metal and plastic that used to be an SUV.
That's okay; the Smart Fortwo only seats two people anyway (hence the name), so it can't carry soccor moms' "babies!"
... but if she plows through an Accord or a Neon somebody's still gonna die. Best not to have the accident in the first place, but that would require accepting some responsibility and actually learning how to drive. Frankly, given the poor track record of SUV drivers as a class, I think they should be required to obtain a CV license. What, that's too much trouble? Tough ... get a minivan.
... much as I detest fools with clamshells glued to their heads I dislike my government assuming that I am one even more. And I really can't stand it when government bans specific behaviors with the express (albeit unstated) purpose of increasing ticket revenues.
Besides, the reason soccer moms drive those damn SUVs is that they are just as hooked on the feeling of power as any male driver: maybe more. They may say "It's for the children!" but that's unadulterated pure baloney. There are plenty of comparatively safe vehicles that don't require a V8, enclose enough space to serve as an aircraft hangar, and need a "WIDE LOAD" sign on the back.
If they cared about those babies (much less all the other women around them driving their babies) they'd drive their vehicles more safely. If they really cared they wouldn't have chosen an overpowered four-wheeled behemoth in the first place. Sure, our hypothetical soccer mom may be more likely to survive an accident in a Yukon
Regardless, cell phone usage should be treated the same way as any other potentially dangerous behavior: we'll trust you to know what you're doing until you screw up. Then we'll take it away from you until you learn your lesson. Pre-emptive banning and presumptive ticketing are punitive and paternal
Focusing on a single attribute of an overarching problem is typical behavior of politicians who either don't know how to deal with the issue, or know that they'll never convince the population to do what has to be done to fix it. Bad driving is becoming endemic to our society: cell phones contribute to that but they are not the root of the evil. Matter of fact, trying to fix this particular problem with laws and penalties is akin to trying to cure diarrhea by tinkering with your toilet.
The passenger is in the car with you can see things going on just as well as you can. So they're less likely to speak at inopportune times. They also tend to keep their own eyes on the road while speaking, so they can alert you if they see a danger that you don't
You've obviously never driven anywhere with the bunch I go to lunch with every day.
We are specializing: it's called "intellectual property law" and we're exporting it left and right. Of course, it doesn't do anyone any good except the human refuse at the top of our corporate food chain, but there it is. IP law sure as hell isn't going to provide for the people of this great nation either ... only one thing will do that: industry.
The problem with the idea of "leaving bulk production" to another nation is that you just sacrificed your independence and control of your own future, because you are now an economic satellite of another power. That's not a good position for any country to be in. Bulk production is what feeds, clothes and houses your population, and any nation that is totally dependent on imports for those things is just asking for trouble. Our "captains of industry" (hah!) are currently hooked on cheap labor and import goods from China, the implicit assumption being that China can be trusted to continue doing business that way. Two things argue against that: one, China is not, after all, allied with the United States at any level and two, without the ability to create wealth we won't have any money to buy the stuff with anyway. At some point in the not too distant future we're going to wish we'd held on to our manufacturing base and the technical people who maintained it.
You have to realize one important fact: China has systematically stripped America of the heavy machine tools we spent a hundred years building, and collapsed the domestic industries that used them. A lot of it can't even be made anymore: the capital costs are too high. Big stamping presses, textile machines, all sorts of heavy equipment that we no longer know how to make have been sold off cheap to Japan and China. Some if it they are using for their own purposes, the rest they simply bought because they didn't want us to have it. So even if we wanted to become self-sufficient again we couldn't do it, not within any meaningful time frame. We are going to regret that.
Yes ... I think something like an automatic sunset provision applied to all laws by default. Of course, as Congress proved with the Patriot Act that doesn't always guarantee that you'll get rid of something you don't want.
Would all those great shows like the Sopranos, Sex in the city, Deadwood, etc ever been possible had HBO been worrying whether or not they're hurting all of those beautiful minds in the heartland?
... is when these little pricks work together!"
Certainly not, they'd have been too risky.
Matter of fact, this is just another example of a bunch of lawyers (i.e., Congress) creating a lot of makework. That's all this is: yet another Congressional subsidy to the corporate attorney crowd, as if Sarbanes-Oxley and intellectual property (hah!) weren't enough. We're at the point where no company can take a breath (much less create something worthwhile) without having to consult some lawyer and have him pass on the idea. Which he won't, with laws like this on the books, because if he did, he wouldn't be doing his job.
Regarding "decency" laws: what is it about certain people that they feel the need to force their pattern for living upon everyone else? I just want to grab one of these idiots by the throat, shake him a few times, and point out that I'M NOT OFFENDED BY A FEW BAD WORDS, YOU STUPID LITTLE PRICK, I PAY THE DAMN CABLE BILL NOT YOU, AND WORRYING ABOUT WHAT ME OR MY FUCKING KIDS SEE ON THE GODDAMN TELEVISION IS ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY NONE OF YOUR GODDAMNED BUSINESS!
"Decency" laws my ass. What we need are laws that make Congress behave decently. I might go for that. But they'd fuck that up too, it's the nature of that particular collective beast. It really is twisted that some of the most amoral individuals in our society are the ones trying to define what is acceptable and "decent" (whatever that actually means) for the rest of us. Still, they do say that hierarchies are like septic tanks: the really big chunks always rise to the top.
And I'm sorry if any of you found this post to be "indecent" but sometimes Congress just torques me into a fucking pretzel. As Lewis Black says, "The only thing STUPIDER than a Republican or a Democrat
Yes, but fortunately beer and food are still beer and food.
If they try to change that they'll have an instant revolution on their hands.
It's called "incrementalism". It's very effective because the majority don't realize it's happening, and those few that do are easily dismissed as paranoids and cranks. It's also been going on for a very long time.
A liberal application of silicone sealer should do the trick. Of course, they won't be quite as photogenic when I'm finished.
Not necessarily. The only "recording" going on is a few kbytes of data temporarily buffered for analysis: if it is immediately discarded and never available to be listened to by a human, I doubt there'd be a problem. The RIAA tried to make a deal out of the temporary storage of music data in a satellite receiver as being a "recording" but that didn't fly either, if I remember correctly.
This rules out AT&T (formerly SBC here) and Comcast is ...
... it's still SBC. Unfortunately. Crap by any other name still smells like crap.
No
My apologies to the Bard.
As I understand it, the telcos aren't common-carriers with regards to so-called "data services" anyway, so they can perfectly well get away with this. Granted the distinction between a voice service and a data service is technologically non-existent anymore, but from a legal perspective it's still very important (as it happens, I have AT&T's Callvantage VoIP service at home ... which set of laws would apply to AT&T in the case?) That's part of the law that does need to be changed, I think.
Now, whether or not they'll have many customers when it's all over is another story. The moment my ISP starts making decisions for me about what I can and cannot download is the day I find another provider. If there aren't any other providers, then I'm going to drive to Washington, D.C. (probably none of us will be able to actually board aircraft at that point), grab Orrin Hatch and a few other select Congresspeople by their lapels and shake some sense into them.
What's amazing about this is the level of influence the media companies are able to wield, in both the government and private sectors. Honestly, they must have some part of their organization whose only job it is to dig up dirt on Congressmen and corporate CEOs. Otherwise I can't see why AT&T would just roll over on this.
Brothel.
We aren't talking about "organically-evolved law", the implication being that such laws evolved over a substantial amount of time and are so ingrained into a society that changing them causes significant disruption. We are talking about recent corruptions/subversions/perversions of organically-evolved law, and such things can be repealed. And they need to repealed soon, before they do become ingrained.
we get to keep the good engineering jobs.
They gave those away too.
Better get a new TV then, it's obviously broken. I hear China is making them now.
It never was what we thought it was ... it's just that current technology makes it easier for the government voyeurs ^h^h^h^h^h^h^hagencies to poke around.
Shame on Apple; this is not the right way of doing DRM.
Not that there's really a right way.
You forgot ESS. Yes, Bell Labs was responsible for a lot of groundbreaking stuff.
... shoddy work, ignorant installers that barely speak English, and when they're all said and done what I get is a ball of twisted pairs floating in midair over my basement floor without so much as a wire nut. Kind of a third-world flavor, really. Then they ARGUE with me when I try to tell them that they have ring and tip backwards or no, you have lines one and two reversed. Bare wires everywhere. I complained but the "technical support" people I spoke to couldn't understand me either and only cared about whether I had working phone service or not. So I had to go get a block and a punchdown tool and do it properly myself. And this for double what the old Bell System used to charge me every month (Comcast had me up to $95/month for two phone lines before I switched to VoIP.)
... what we lost was the world's most reliable phone system.
I have to say, though, I agree. There were a lot of legitimate complaints registered about the Bell System at the time, but customer support wasn't one of them. They had quality of service standards they had to live with, and by and large they did. I ran a good-sized multi-node BBS in the mid-to-late eighties (16 or so lines) and I have to tell you, the technical support I got from our local RBOC was stellar. They had a nominal charge of $40/quarter hour at the time, but I had a guy come out and install 18 phone lines at my home. He spent two days running cables around the place (because of the way the place was built he couldn't drill through the floors) and only charged me a hundred bucks. All solid, quality work, and the installer actually had considerable training in general electronics and telephone theory. Knew what he was talking about, let me tell you, and he told me that he got all that training from the company school. As an engineer myself, I was impressed. But hey, AT&T expected to be around and they expected their employees to stick around, and it was worth the investment. Hell, once he had it all in place he said, "you're gonna want at least one hunt group for this: if you have me set it up for you now it won't cost you anything." Cool.
Contrast that to what I've received from Comcast and SBC in the past fifteen years or so
The reality is that presiding Judge Green (who was oh-so-concerned about unspecified additional "services" that weren't available to the consumer because of the AT&T monopoly) was just too impatient. The Internet came along and we got all those things anyway
Yeah, sure. The breakup was a great thing.
Yes, Carter was a terrible President, but there is a qualitative difference between "fish out of water" and "corrupt to the core."
If you want to watch the RIAA start having real problems, you simply have to publicly and repeatedly associate them with abortion, or cute, furry animals, or any hot-button issue that has a militant wing. Maybe a bunch of wackos in pirate outfits would storm the place. Serve them right.
It's not a method to identify "pirates" (and I use the term very loosely here.) The MPAA has, so far, not implemented the RIAA model of suing the very people that like and use their products. Hopefully, they're too smart for that (not holding my breath though.) What they do want is a high-profile case such as this, to scare casual torrent users into not being torrent users. Same sort of thing the RIAA has done, and it will probably have about as much success in terms of reducing casual infringement.
... but there are too many of them, I can't control them, and to ignore them would result in disaster. Consequently, I adjust my driving to avoid a bad outcome. The media companies are in the same boat with regards to their customer base, and at some level I think they realize that.
I get the impression that these people just can't see another way, don't feel that we, as their customer base, have the right to demand another way. We do, as it happens. We don't want your product on the terms you are offering it. In the past, that would have meant we either did without, or the suppliers changed their product or way of doing business. Nowadays, we can make do with a reduced quality copy of your product whether you want us to or not. And you know what? That's good enough for most of us. The time may come when we all have the bandwidth to receive a full, unabridged, untranscoded version of your product. If you don't have a mechanism in place then to stop us (good luck with that) or a better way for us to buy your product, you're screwed.
So times change: they do, and it doesn't matter whether you want them to or not, doesn't matter whether copyright infringement on a massive scale is morally akin to murder (as some apparently believe.) Doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong. I liken the advent of downloading to driving on the expressway. Yeah, most of the people around me are idiots who drive too fast, or too slow, make gratuitous lane changes and other stupid and often illegal moves
As their front organization is run by lawyers, however, it's not surprising that all of their proposed solutions involve the legal system.
The bad news is the laws may inadvertently hurt the ethical researchers and help the bad guys.
Inadvertently? I don't think so. This kind of stuff is often done on purpose, and not always for the stated reasons.
Maybe, if you're an idiot and don't take the proper steps. For example, if you go through Tor or I2P or some other anonymizing network you should be okay. Matter of fact, I predict a huge spike in the size of such networks. Mark my words, folks, the term Onion Router is about to become part of the popular lexicon.
Let's hope they scale well.