The other night I saw Twilight: New Moon. I'm not sure what all the hate is about. Yes, it's a terrible movie. Yes, the acting is worse than most YouTube videos. Yes, the characters are all shallow and uninteresting. And yes, there are lots of half-naked men walking around for no apparent reason.

All those things just make it more awesome. It stole the record for being the highest-grossing movie on an opening day. According to Wikipedia, the movie made $72,740,052 in a single day. It turns out that, when marketing to teen girls, revenue is inversely related to the amount of clothing that main characters wear. Imagine that formula as a strategic direction.

Last year I was working with an entertainment brand (a video game to be precise) that skewed heavily female. It was somewhat targeted at women as a product, and a large part of the consumer base just happened to be made up of teen girls. The company which owned this brand had determined that the only way they could grow the brand was by trying to bring more men into the franchise. I thought, “Why? Why not completely own that space? What’s wrong with creating a product that speaks directly to women? Why would you water down your communications in order to try to appeal to men?” Clearly, they should have just come out with a Twilight-themed version of their product.

Twilight shines as a beacon that shows how powerful the female demographic is. The notion that a movie as bad as Twilight could sell so well is a testament to their collective purchasing power. It also goes to show you that a movie doesn’t have to be any good in order to be a box office hit – it just needs naked people.

Today marks the end of an era, as The Pirate Bay team announces that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is shutting down for good. Although the site will remain operational for now, millions of BitTorrent users will lose the use of its tracker and will instead have to rely on DHT and alternative trackers to continue downloading.

Today The Pirate Bay tracker went down for good. May it rest in piece.

What's interesting is that in its place is DHT – which is, essentially, a distributed tracker. I believe there is a "Yo dawg" hidden in here somewhere, along the lines of, "Yo dawg, I heard you like to pirate movies. We put a torrent in your torrent so you can download while you download!"

My biggest criticism of the the RIAA and MPAA is that they never try to fight piracy through economics. You've never seen them try to slash prices to get people back into a store buying CDs. Or mandate that labels and publishers drop DRM so that more paying customers can enjoy content without restriction. Instead they try to fight piracy by attempting to filibuster technology and innovation. It's futile.

And while you might want to hate on the RIAA and MPAA, the great irony is that they are the ones essentially pushing people to innovate. Every time their politics result in a "landmark victory", the resistance engineers a better, faster, and more distributed way to share content. Can you imagine if they never touched Napster? People would still be downloading single songs at 100 Kbps. Instead, today people download entire albums and whole discographies at 10 Mbps. So, they killed The Pirate Bay. Big deal. This time next year there will be another solution that will be 10 times faster, have 10 times as much content, and be more difficult to manage from an IP perspective than anything that has come before it.