I think I’ve killed the last bug in this version, so I’ve moved it from beta to release status.
That brings me to SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act legislation currently in the U.S. House of Representatives and sponsored by the television and movie industry, the same folks who own the companies that distributed the vast majority of software used for pirating their content. Wow, it’s hard to express my feelings for these folks, suffice to say disease and pestilence are the least I wish upon them.
Claims that they are losing billions of dollars in revenue to piracy are, to my mind, vastly overblown. One thing they never seem to mention is each illegal movie download does not equate to lost revenue. A great many of these people would not watch the movie or video if they had to pay for it, so they cannot be equated to lost revenue. No question some would pay but many would not. The reason is simple, the content is often so poor that it’s not worth paying for. I do not condone theft and I make my living writing software, the last thing I want is for someone to steal it but I also would not expect them to pay if the quality was shit.
I purchased a ROKU streamer last month, a very cool device and purchased primarily so we can watch streams provided in association with Amazon Prime. It comes with the Hulu Plus channel. I looked into what this was and decided that while it would be nice to have it’s not worth the $7.99 a month. While some of the content is good, shelling out another $100 a year for yet more commercials is just not something I’m willing to do on top of what we pay for satellite. If it were commercial free, possibly but for the same money I can get netflix and IMO this is a vastly superior option. If I was a network TV junkie perhaps I would be willing to pay for people to try and sell me more shit that is not needed but there is not a chance. This is an example of why people choose to pirate content, paying a fee to be force fed advertisements for content that is not that good in the first place is just stupid. The content providers make nearly all their revenue from advertising and it seems very likely that the content itself is just too poor to entice people to pay for it.
Enough blather for today. Hope you enjoy the FWL utility. Oh yeah, just an FYI, it doesn’t download or connect to the internet in any way, so no worries about the piracy police coming after you for using it. Hopefully you obtained all your music via legal means, the FWL utility is simply a means for providing a local, uncompressed copy at playback time from content you already own.
mg