Saving Hollywood

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 19, 5:53PM EDT

Even with Pirate Bay convicted, the studios need to figure out a digital strategy.

By Chris Thompson of The Big Money

Last month, four men who run the Pirate Bay, perhaps the largest movie-piracy Web site on the planet, were convicted in a Swedish court of promoting copyright infringement and sentenced to a year in prison apiece. These men were true believers, high-concept pranksters, and sworn enemies of the movie industry. Dubbing the proceedings a “spectrial,” (an amalgam of trial and spectacle), they and their supporters drove a bus around Europe, rallying people to their side. Friends of the cause protested outside the courthouse, where the bus was parked and served as their public relations headquarters. The Pirate Bay operators reportedly tried to buy Sealand, a defunct oil rig in the North Sea, in order to escape national copyright laws. After the conviction, some 25,000 Swedes joined the Pirate Party, a political party affiliated with Pirate Bay and dedicated to the “reform” of copyright laws.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.