I’ve just read that there were again some law suits filed against persons who illegaly distributed movies over the internet, and it made me really angry.

I thought I’d see what legal offers there are for video on demand, and tell you what, here in Germany there exists exactly one: T-Online vision (the catch is of course you have to be one of their customers, since you can only download the movies when you’re connected to the internet via T-Online). And that’s it.

Is it any wonder that illegal downloading of movies is still thriving like that when the movie industry offers one single (and limited to boot) legal alternative for a market of over 80 million people?

Like the music industry, which is mostly bitching about gigantic losses but chooses to invest their money in lawsuits and better digital rights managment systems, the movie industry fails to see they have a very valuable asset at their disposal: the finished product, be it music or movies. People wouldn’t download them if they didn’t want to see them, but while they’re busy shutting down torrent sites and making ridiculous anti-piracy ads, I suppose there is no time left to work on a user-friendly, customer-respecting, varied catalogue with reasonable prices.

iTunes is a step in the right direction – however when I read that music industry bosses think the prices are too low, it’s clear to me they have learned absolutely nothing. What the world needs is not the MPAA proudly listing the people they sued today or yet another gagging restriction for multimedia files. What it really needs is a flexible industry which firstly doesn’t see the customer as the enemy and secondly strives to make the music it produces as easily available as possible. I can’t believe that is asking too much.