from the Failed Policies Department

Hana Beshara helped operate a website that streamed "pirated" movies and TV shows. She was caught as part of a sting by the Department of Homeland Security. She went to federal prison for almost a year and a half. This and other arrests of similarly hardened criminals has stopped movie "piracy" in its tracks. Wait, um, no, not stopped...what's the phrase? Oh, yeah: had absolutely no effect on movie piracy whatsoever.

You can say, The law is the law and If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Except that the law has been written by giant media corporations and their lobbyists to protect their own decades-old business models. The history of entrepreneurship—particularly in the media industries—is essentially a story of one "illegal" assault on old technologies and outmoded business models after another, trademark wars, intellectual property "theft," and rampant bootlegging that then turned into, say, the motion picture business, or radio, or cable television, or the VCR. Funded Ivy-league prodigies become billionaires doing this. Less gilded kids go to federal prison.