Firefly
A friend of mine (OK, a BUNCH of friends of mine) turned me on to this show recently.
It ran for 10 episodes on FOX back in '02. It died a slow death because, according to everyone, Fox didn't really know how to treat the show. Based on everything I read and have seen, they'd be right. Fox didn't air the pilot (Serenity) as the first episode, they ended up airing it at the end of it's run. Thus the second ep (The Train Job) became a 1-hour pilot, and it didn't really do much to introduce the characters. They aired the episodes out of order, and generally liked to pre-empt the show for sporting events — so they killed it.
Fan outcry was such that they actually made a movie last year, called Serenity, and the TV series is a top 25 seller at Amazon STILL, over 2 years after its release.
I resisted for a long time, but Amazon dropped the price from $40 to $20 recently for the whole series.
I do not regret this purchase. Think Star Trek, except instead of aliens it's a western setting. It appears that EVERYONE is human, and all the planets tend to have an old-west lawlessness feel. I mean, hell, they still use BULLETS. Except for the spaceships, which use spaceship stuff. And with Ron Glass (Detective Ron Harris from Barney Miller), you can NEVER go wrong.
Sadly, no...
In part one, our nefarious villain called the RIAA actually had the gall to say that radio is a form of piracy. They declared that the radio industry is making billions off the backs of recording artists, while conveniently ignoring the fact that recording artists make billions off the backs of the radio industry.
This is really the same story as last year; the RIAA has introduced teh "Performance Rights Bill" which would require radio to pay millions for the right to advertise the RIAA's own product, which the people would then buy, making more money for... the RIAA.
The Ars article linked has a bit more of the sinister side of what will happen if this is bill is passed, however.
The law, if passed, won't just affect the US. Because the US currently doesn't have a radio performance right, US radio stations pay nothing to foreign recording artists when they play their songs. That might not sound like a big deal until you realize that foreign countries generally exempt their own broadcasters from paying to play US music on the air because of this situation.
OK, so a normal person (or even an artist) should be thinking that this means "If we get this passed, it will cost more to play US music in other nations, meaning our music won't be heard in as many stations, which could lead to a further decline in sales. Yes?
Yes? No!
The lack of a performance right is therefore "an inequity that costs American artists tens of millions of dollars each year" from overseas stations, according to the RIAA.
I'm not one to use the hippie newspeak in which "corporation" is a 4-letter word. At the same time, though, when reading about things like this, I can see exactly where they're coming from. They are among the last of the dinosaurs, still trying to resist the change in their failing business model. The passage of this law will be the death rattle for this industry, and too many people are too blind to notice.