David Pogue of The New York Times writes:
You can’t pick up a newspaper without reading about the escalating battle between music companies and their customers. The recording industry believes that its decline in CD sales stems primarily from music pirates who download songs from the Internet. All kinds of loopy behavior has resulted, including lawsuits against everyone from 12-year-old girls to 80-year-old grandmothers.
Now, Hollywood believes that it’s next, that before long, we’ll be tossing illegally downloaded movies back and forth on the Internet with abandon. Surely, they think, all of these crazy college kids online will send all of the mighty distribution empires to the poorhouse.
Good thing they don’t know about a well-organized, tightly run organization that routinely distributes brand-name DVD’s and music CD’s to all comers, for free — an institution that hasn’t even raised an eyebrow at the music and movie companies.
It’s called the public library.