Civilisation Under Threat (Again)

Friday, 15 November 2002

According to this report in Australian IT, level-headed Star Wars producer Rick McCallum has a pretty clear perspective on the next major threat to western civilisation as we know it: big budget movie production, the cornerstone of Western culture faces a total collapse in 3 years unless something is done about the growing threat of international consumer extremism and peer-to-peer file sharing. Rick told a Melbourne audience that

The drive to protect movie copyright needed to be "as concentrated an international event as the war on terrorism"

Unless this international effort is forthcoming, Rick warns that the Movie industry could suffer the same drastic loss of revenues as the Music industry - in other words movie makers might actually start to make real losses instead of the paper losses that turn box-office smashes into apparent commercial failures. It might even spell the end of Star Wars as we know it, so instead of the full 9 episode series originally planned by George Lucas we would have to settle for a curtailed 6 episode version of the epic tale - which would be rather like Wagner croaking midway through composing his Ring cycle, leaving us with only Das Rheingold, Siegfried and the first act of Die Walkure, with no Gotterdammerung to tie up all the loose ends.

Obviously Australia needs to get behind this coming major international effort ...

Sorry about the interruption. I have to go now - there's a couple of blokes at the door who say they're from the Business Software Association of Australia with something called an "Anton Piller order".