Every now and then there’ll be a report in the press about yet another RIAA/MPAA initiative to crack down on piracy, and the PRs will trot out the same old tired stats and make the same old weary comments about how their industry is being ruined by piracy. But the fact is most people don’t pirate and have no wish to, all they want is their digital entertainment delivered in the fastest most efficient way. And they’ll pay for it too. But the entertainment suits keep failing to understand what that means.

What’s needed is something like this Movies.io site, which offers an incredibly simple movie search engine which works brilliantly. You type in the movie title you want to watch, and the service returns a bunch of sources to help you find it. The sources include renting from Netflix, IMDB and TMDB data and –  controversially –  BitTorrent downloads.

Users can sign in, maintain watch (or rewatch) lists of their faves, view trailers and do a variety of searches by date. All in all, a great way to keep up to date with, and track great films. Of course the industry will ignore the fact that the site has attracted nearly 12,000 users in the month since launch, that there are already 24,000 watchlists and 27000 movies listed, and point to the BitTorrent feature as an example of pure evil.

But how cool would it be if this kind of instant download/view could be part of a legally commercial service with all the legitimate licenses etc, so we could take advantage of easy search and play for movies when we wanted to watch them, instantly, on computer, phone or flat screen? But instead, within a short time, the lawyers will be in action again, and we’ll slump back in our chairs and wait for the next innovation to be swept away by corporate incompetence. Personally I blame Napster.